One year of working in the Metaverse

Pretty soon, according to a bunch of smart companies, we’ll all be living in the Metaverse. So how about working there?

One year ago, I started working as a community builder at a game company called Adventure Box, right at the start of the first global lockdown.

How do you create a company culture and working community when you don’t get to actually meet the people you need to spend every day with?

We did it by spending one year working in the Metaverse.

DECEMBER: GETTING OUR GAMEFACE ON

New headsets are coming all the time, many of them aimed at companies. But if you’re looking at the best, easiest solution at the lowest price, you’ll probably go with Metas Quest 2.

We got 25 of these, put the company logotype on them, and had them sent out around Christmas, with a note encouraging everyone to have fun with them. So in effect, the company sent out an essential work tool and packaged it as a great gift, making everyone happy. Winning!

THE KEY is to get people to use the headset, as soon and as much as possible. If your team gets addicted to Beat Saber, that is a good thing, because that means they consider this hunk of plastic on their heads their new best friend, and are ready to start using it in their daily work.

2. GET A ROOM, PEOPLE

Next step is creating a space to meet. There’s a bunch of ready-made solutions for this that come out of the box. Some are free, some cost money. Some are easy to use, some more complicated. We ended up choosing an app called Spatial.

The reason for this is that it has a comparatively good onboarding process, that is fairly simple and straightforward.

What I am looking for in a digital meeting space is ordered in a set of priorities, based on my preferences. Yours may vary. But most meeting apps are essentially similar. My priorities are:

1. It needs to be cross platform. A key part of onboarding your team is that people can access the meeting easily. Apps like Spatial can be accessed not only through VR but through an iOS/android app, as well as a web browser, apart from VR.
2. Onboarding must be silky smooth. Every extra click, every configuration, every login is a huge hurdle to adapting to a new platform. In Apple parlance, things must simply work. In Spatials case, you can join a room by clicking a link. You do not even need to create an account or an avatar to participate.
3. The platform should be easy to adapt to your wishes, more on this in the next chapter. But for me less is definitely more. A bland, blank space with empty walls, enough to convey a feeling of spatiality, but more like a blank paper than a filled canvas.

You create a digital avatar based on a simple selfie, and simply click a link to add the new room to your spatial library. There’s a bunch of room designs for you to choose from, but an important point is that they are easy to customise and make your own.

3. PIMP YOUR METAVERSE

When your team takes their first steps in the Metaverse, it’s gonna be a brand new place for most of them. And when you’re in a new place, it helps to see something familiar. Most systems including Spatial supports importing transparent PNG’s. Get your company logo and Boom! That bland digital office space is now your digital headquarters.

Make sure your team also get to pimp your collective space. At Adventurebox my colleague Emmy had created a cat for a game. He was imported into the space and became Voxel the Office Cat. Every meeting alway began with everyone petting Voxel. Just like any office space, you can customise it to suit your meeting. Sometimes it can be a war room, with PDF’s and excel sheets pinned to the wall. Sometimes it can be a cozy cuddle around a campfire. And sometimes, it can be an office party, with both actual and virtual drinks being served.

If you have an actual real office, why not scan that and bring it into VR? A hybrid meeting where the people in the office are sharing a room with the people attending from the Metaverse.

I made a separate video about scanning environments using LIDAR, which I’ve linked to here.

The point of making a digital twin of your actual office is that it lets people connect to the spaces where you’ll meet in real life. Adventure Box got a new office during the pandemic, and my team knew it by heart before they’d ever set foot in it.

Today our space is a very cosy part of the Metaverse. On the walls are inspirational images, links to other digital spaces we hang out, cool 3D models and of course, Voxel the office cat.

4. MAKING IT A HABIT

I work in digital communication, but before the pandemic I’d been in video meetings maybe 5 times. Now, it is like a second nature to me, my co-workers, even my grandparents. So did video conferencing suddenly become that much more awesome at the start of 2020? Nope, life just forced us to try it. Once, five times, ten times. And then it’s a habit.

In the same way, you need to make working in the metaverse a habit. Once you get your VR setup, don’t just use it once and think you’ll come back to it. You need to create a new behavior, not only for yourself but for your team. Insist on swapping out every other zoom meeting for a meeting in Spatial.

At Adventure Box, we had all of our daily standups in Spatial. And as a result, we started to feel at home in the metaverse, and that is when the real benefits can be reaped. Because social VR is only the beginning. It’s what comes next that will really blow your mind and forever change the way you work.

5. WHO’S ON FIRST? (PASSING THE AXE)

When you work in the metaverse, especially when you meet your colleagues, there are a lot of ways that you can work together in a more natural way. Yes, this is a new way of working. Yes, it will take some time getting used to.

First of all, where a video call is essentially you looking at a flat screen, a metaverse work session is like spending time in a room together. So behave just like you did in a meeting with actual people. Respect your colleagues virtual self.

We quickly found that one thing that was hard in any digital meeting was knowing who speaks when. We solved this problem in the time honored viking tradition, by applying an axe to it. The person holding the axe was the person talking, and when he or she was done with it, they’d pass the axe along. And if you wanted to speak, you had to… axe for it.

Building a community in the metaverse and spending part of your workday there is really rewarding. The Pandemic, for all its evils, actually dragged us kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Many workplaces really suffered during the pandemic, for not getting to meet face to face. And while there’s been a short return to normalcy, the pandemic is not done with us yet.

My advice to you is to embrace working in the metaverse. It’s not going to replace either video calls or actual meetings anytime soon, but what it will do is expand that digital space we all have to live in now. And it will bring you inspiration.

If you want to know more about working in the Metaverse, maybe I can help you and your team get started. Together with a group of fellow evangelists, I specialise in introducing work groups to working in new ways. I can be your Metaverse spirit guide. Get in touch and we’ll work something out.