Why the metaverse is a real deal and how it will impact the future of work
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is changing the company name to Meta, doubling down on its commitment to building a metaverse. The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1992 sci-fi novel “Snow Crash’’ but has only become a buzzword recently. This time, the metaverse associated with Facebook’s conviction seems to make the future of a hybrid world sound more realistic than ever.
As a venture creator and investor in the HR and Talent Tech space, Talent Venture Group (TVG) strives to look to and understand how technological progress will drive or make an impact on the future of work. We have been watching the space closely with the slow adoption of AR/VR for training programs and collaboration and productivity tools but this major move by a major player such as Facebook, who is already an undeniably part of “how we live” and is now jumping in to re-engineer “how we work”, definitely caught our attention and made the future of the metaverse more real.
Post pandemic, with flexible work here to stay (over 70 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to continue, according to Microsoft), the remaining question is how technologies will progress in order to accommodate this new normal, i.e how technologies will accommodate collaboration and interactions in the hybrid world. Some Big Tech seem to already have asked this question and came up with the answer by entering the metaverse race, i.e Facebook rebranded the company to Meta and Microsoft Teams introduced their new 3D avatars and immersive meetings.
It seems that the metaverse technologies will not only be “just hype”. Instead, the internet will probably become the metaverse, impacting the world in which we live, work, and play. So what is the metaverse, how will it impact the future of work and what challenges do we see when it comes to building and using the metaverse? Buckle up and let’s explore.
📚What is the metaverse?
There are many definitions of the metaverse — some think it is far off while others think it is already here. Others think there can be multiple metaverses. It is often described as a virtual environment where people live, work, and play. When I think about the metaverse, I think of a future real world that is universally accepted and a combination of the physical world and the virtual world. In this real world, the virtual world is not separated from the physical one but instead interlinked to it. People won’t have to log off from a device in order to be left in peace in the physical world playing board games with family, hanging out with friends, or attending exercise classes. Instead, we will all live, work and play inside this reality; we will continuously and seamlessly move from one place to another, be it virtual or physical, a paradigm transition to which the metaverse represents. The metaverse will probably “eventually encompass work, entertainment, and everything in-between”.
According to CB Insights, “the metaverse refers to the idea of a shared, persistent, virtual space, akin to a digital mirror of the real world — but without any of the constraints”. The metaverse is driven by augmented reality through the creation of an avatar or a character. The concept of the metaverse was absolutely not born yesterday when Mark announced Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, it actually has been a popular concept in gaming in recent years. Some aspects of the metaverse exist in virtual video game worlds such as in-game events, virtual economies, and other in-game services that cross over into other aspects of our lives. Some notable examples in the metaverse world are Roblox, which IPO-ed in March 2021 (a gaming platform that also hosts virtual events like concerts and meetups for gamers), SecondLife (a 3D virtual environment where users control avatars for socializing, learning, and business), Axie Infinity (a play-to-earn trading and battling game that allows players to collect, breed, raise, battle, and trade creatures which are digitized as NFTs) and Decentraland (an online, digital world that combines social elements with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and virtual real estate). Pokemon Go is also seen as an early example of the physical and digital worlds beginning to merge.
According to Venture Capitalist Matthew Ball, the metaverse’s attributes are persistence, synch-first, and individual presence. It will be a fully functioning economy, interoperated and populated by “content” and “experiences” while being created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors.
Besides supporting gaming or social media, the metaverse will combine economies, digital identity, decentralized governance, eyewear technologies such as VR/AR and other applications so that we can access it, create real values and own assets in this world. Blockchain, virtual currencies, and NFT marketplaces will fuel the development of metaverse.
🔔 What will the future of work, enabled by the metaverse, look like?
There are several areas of HR & Talent Tech where metaverse will make a direct impact on. These include (1) collaboration & productivity, (2) virtual office & virtual events, (3) employee onboarding, as well as (4) corporate training, coaching & development programs. The metaverse will also enable a major shift in the talent acquisition value chain, especially in the talent sourcing stage where there will be (5) new types of jobs and platforms for individuals working in and designing the metaverse. Finally, the metaverse will also change how people will (6) make money and get paid.
The state of remote work seems to finally usher in their regular use of VR and AR, the vital components of the metaverse. According to PwC, nearly 23 million jobs worldwide would be using AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) by 2030 for training, work meetings or to provide better customer service. The difference between AR and VR is that while AR adds to your vision by projecting images over whatever you look at, VR, necessarily activated by a VR headset, takes over your vision and replaces your surroundings with something else. Big Tech for years has been trying at AR technologies with for example Google Glass and Snap Spectacles, whereas VR headsets such as PlayStation VR are more commonly used in gaming and alternative virtual worlds. The implication of using the VR and AR technologies in the workplace to bridge the gap between in-person and remote working, increasing collaboration and productivity, is clear from Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms (by the way, it’s not just a rosy picture painted for the media; Horizon Workrooms has been used in practice for internal meetings for about six months, according to Zuckerberg). For the Horizon Workroom to work, one needs a Facebook VR headset named Oculus Headset. The idea is that you put the headset on, and all of a sudden you, no matter where you are, will be in some sort of a virtual workspace with all of your colleagues. In this virtual space, you will be able to see holographic avatars of your colleagues, walk around, talk with your coworkers, and collaborate with them on a virtual whiteboard.
If we’re being even more futuristic, the hologram technology will get to the point where we don’t need any VR/AR or the VR/AR technology will come as small and implantable as chips to our bodies, resulting in the interactions in the virtual world becoming more real. Imagine shopping on the street, visiting a friend, or joining a party as a hologram, all feeling as real as if we were at the real place even though we might be continents apart.
Virtual Office and Virtual Events applications is also an emerging area in HR & Talent Tech where avatar-based metaverse technologies would play a major part. These types of solutions may include a virtual floor plan, the ability to move around between rooms, mimicking the feeling of walking around a physical space and socializing with other people, aiming to develop bonds among the team members who are working remotely or facilitating communications in a networking setup. In October, Shopify, one of the largest eCommerce platforms, introduced an internal avatar-based game to make “virtual hangouts more fun” called Shopify Party, a simpler version of the metaverse that does not require proper devices and installations. Having hundreds of games that are played each week for purposes of icebreakers, standups, and other team events, Shopify Party is “pitched as an investment and experimentation in the future of remote work”, according to Retail Technology Innovation Hub.
VR and AR will more commonly be used in employee onboarding, as well as corporate training, coaching & development programs. Remote onboarding will no longer be limited to its digital capabilities such as messaging or onboarding checklists but will be expanded to an immersive experience with 3D avatars and simulations. Employee training, coaching and development will be delivered without the necessity of physical proximity; training centers, meeting rooms and lounges can be established in the metaverse where employees interact with their colleagues or form a team to participate in a game-based training session.
In terms of future job opportunities, new jobs that don’t exist today will be created by the metaverse, just as what we have seen with the labor market nowadays, which is driven by Web 2.0 technology. According to The Verge, the metaverse will “bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited”. There will be an increased demand for office and virtual experience design jobs as well as virtual product development, be it in the entertainment, retail, or fashion industry.
The metaverse will also change how people will make money and get paid, i.g there are now and will be more and more people who can make additional incomes through creator platforms or virtual environments such as play-to-earn Axie Infinity and SecondLive. Here we’ll see that the HR Systems and Rewards capability that now belongs to centralized organizational entity will be shifted to individuals who work in the gig and/or decentralized creator economy. There will be new solution platforms that cater to the needs of the independent workforce and address independent worker insurance, wellbeing and benefits.
🚥 Challenges
There are various challenges when it comes to building and using the metaverse but I think it’s worthwhile to highlight two important ones here, namely infrastructure and identity.
In one of his interviews, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Five years from now, people will be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want but feel present when they do it.” I wouldn’t be confident about the 5-year timeline, because it seems that in order for the whole idea of a fully immersive, collaborative environment (which is very early-stage at the moment) within the metaverse adopted by the mass audience to be in place, it will require an awful lot of investment into infrastructure. We’re talking about the underlying technical support required such as IoT, blockchain, and low-latency 5G/6G. We will need to find a solution to the server burden problem including graphics streams as well as online motion representation of 2.9 billion people in the metaverse (Facebook’s MAU Q3’21). And certainly, we will need advanced VR/AR headsets to be more accessible and affordable to the masses. Different groups of stakeholders of the economy from tech developers, to lawmakers, and investors need to be involved in the collaboration if the economic infrastructure that will enable the metaverse is to be achieved. Lacking the infrastructure element means that the utopia (or dystopia as some might argue) of a new civilization built on the cutting edge of the metaverse technology would fall into pieces.
The other concern about the avatar-based metaverse society is identity and the sense of individuality in the metaverse. In the world of the metaverse as it is talked about nowadays, what we see is not exactly our colleagues, but their avatars, or an approximate of them. We’re no longer seeing our actual faces like in the digital environment such as Zoom, Facetime, or other video calls. Instead, under the influence of the VR/AR technologies, in the metaverse, we actually lose our faces. We lose the sense of seeing the person exactly as they are in real life: we can only “assume” when stumbling upon our colleagues, like “I don’t know for sure if that is Rebecca. But looks like her, sounds like her, so it must be her!” Additionally, since we in the metaverse are not a real person but rather “a flip” of the person, it’s challenging to ensure the legitimacy of the entity that we are interacting with. Here comes the problem of identity authentication and data integrity that future technology development will need to address.
🚩 Where do we go from here?
Even though I’m a big believer in new technologies like the metaverse, it might still be too early to make any bold statements. There will likely be a long way off, but we can already see a lot of technological movements. I’m more interested in the idea that Metaverse becomes the embodied internet where the physical world and the digital continuation of it become the one and only reality. To most of us, even just with mobile phones, the internet may already feel like a blended part of our lives from the moment we wake up to when we go to bed. With the addition of the metaverse, we would essentially jump from the physical world to the metaverse as seamlessly as there were no boundaries between them. In fact, if companies, creators, and developers are all in this partnership to engineer the metaverse across one specific platform, when it is fully embedded into day-to-day life there will probably be no boundary. We will live, work and play in this one and only reality.
Maybe it’s more important now to start to think about the future we would like to live in and what the metaverse existence would do to our shared sense of reality.
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