I recently acquired an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and I’ve been reacquainting myself with the Metaverse.
Back in 2006, I became really excited about the possibilities that arose from using interactive 3D environments for work. I worked for IBM at that time, and we did some fascinating experiments in Second Life. I remember seeing everything from slide presentations to a 3D representation of a data centre which had live links to the real thing. You could fly around in it, and see which servers were misbehaving.
However, perhaps the technology was not quite mature enough at that stage, and it didn’t catch on in a big way. What this experience did make clear to me was that the potential impact of virtual worlds on work was colossal. Fast-forward to 2021, and Facebook has changed its name to Meta and announced a considerable investment in creating “the Metaverse”. Microsoft announced their version of it in March 2021, known as Mesh. They are now rolling out Mesh for Microsoft Teams.
Recently, I’ve been exploring VR work environments with Dan Hammond of Squadify. We’ve been trying out Horizon Workrooms from Meta. It was fun. We made a video.
