The dynamic, open and interoperable virtual space where users interact for life, work, learning and play is called the Metaverse. Technically speaking, the metaverse is a collision and coming together of individual worlds and has psychological implications in addition to the physical and emotional experiences.
Is the Metaverse here? It is in few niche areas, and by 2030, according to McKinsey and Co., it could be worth at least $5 trillion and add value across sectors and disciplines. Nvidia, in collaboration with Microsoft, has already released the Omniverse, a cloud-based platform that will help build 3D applications for the industrial metaverse.
There is a popular quote by William Shakespeare in the play As You Like It, which goes, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” This is the Metaverse for you when the entire world comes together. Users can work from any location of their choice, presenting themselves as 3D avatars int he spaces they choose to enter. They can even make purchases (real or digital) in virtual shops or play games on arcade machines.
The Metaverse is ripe with opportunities when it comes to remote work. The Metaverse will not only enable remote work but add a lot of value to it. The Metaverse will allow colleagues to work together in real-time or asynchronously and provides a range of environments that can be customized according to a user’s preferences. The Metaverse is based on crucial pillars that enable it. Let us look at them now as they all make their way onto the stage.
VR, AR and MR taken collectively is a crucial pillar of the Metaverse and perhaps the one it hinges on most. Because this is what makes bridging the gap with accepted reality possible. Here’s how it impacts the Metaverse.
According to Capgemini, a 10% positive surge in operations was experienced by 75% of companies after implementing XR (Extended Reality). The main reason was effective communication and collaboration and savings in infrastructure by implementing XR.
Moreover, research shows that VR can help reduce the risk of injury by 43%, which in turn translates to substantial financial savings by way of reducing worker’s medical claims and legal fees.
Edge computing, a distributed computing framework, focuses on bringing computing in enterprise applications as close to the source of data as possible. Here’s what it can do.
If virtual and augmented realities and edge computing make the Metaverse possible, the trump card in the long game of the Metaverse is the arrival of 6G. Currently 5G supports limited industrial use cases in AR and VR using specialized headsets and apps on smartphones. IoT will be the data engine linking the physical with the digital world.
This is the missing bit of the Metaverse puzzle. AI is crucial to making the Metaverse work seamlessly and to increase human productivity within it and to automate certain tasks. Let us see how it becomes an integral part of the Metaverse.
But what exactly will the Metaverse look like at the confluence of all these technologies? What will a typical workplace look like? Let us look at a workplace scenario to understand this. Imagine a team is preparing a sales pitch. They are trying to address a client they haven’t presented to before. All they have are YouTube videos, possibly TED Talks of the client, podcasts and other interviews where the client is speaking. Content from blogs authored by the client could also help architect the persona.
The Metaverse can help with the sales pitch too. AI will create a digital twin of the person they will be presenting too. The sales team enters the Metaverse and begins presenting to the digital twin/persona. An AI agent will be monitoring the conversation, learning from it, even helping the sales team in real-time to ask the right questions and present the right answers to the client, finally helping them clinch the deal. Sounds a bit stretched, doesn’t it? It’s the future and this is what it looks like when the Metaverse comes into full form.
We know the universe itself to be continuously expanding. Could that happen to the Metaverse? The Metaverse, given the combined power of all these technologies, will continues to expand as these technologies and the way they interact improves.
As more realities are created within the Metaverse, there is no denying it could be more expansive than the world we know or the limits of the solar system in terms of distance in virtual space. This has already happened in video games. A user created a 1:1 map in the game Garry’s Mod, which is 2048 times the size of the actual universe and houses several galaxies.
The Pandemic brought with it the ubiquitousness of remote work. But even the larger companies went back to working from their offices post the pandemic. If the Metaverse was widely prevalent, perhaps this would not have happened. We may have moved to 100% remote work in 5 years or so. Of course, this is just conjecture. And when it comes to the future of the Metaverse, no one can predict it with 100% accuracy.
There could even be individual metaverses, industry, corporate and consumer, all shaping themselves separately. We have not even considered that in the present article. If it is a singular Metaverse, will it be based on Blockchain, unowned by a single entity and allowing safer, faster, secure and more decentralized transactions?
Or will it be owned by a single enterprise? How do we then regulate such an enterprise? Will all the governments of the world play a hand in regulating it? Questions such as these can only be answered by travelling into the future a good ten years ahead. What we have presented in the article is a best guess of what is to happen to the workplace if the Metaverse becomes a reality. Actual events will be decided by the direction technology and most importantly policy takes.