Over the course of a couple of months last 12 months, Trever Stewart rigorously scanned his media company's 20,000-square-foot animation studio and recreated it within the metaverse. Now he's beginning to invite ad agency clients to meetings on this virtual space in order that they can see how their animated content is created — from the within.
“The metaverse is a big failure – but humans (firms like Meta) have developed the tools so we are able to now create a brand new world!” says Stewart, associate producer of special projects at Bent Image Lab. “It's crazy.”
“For example, in case you pick up a mayonnaise jar with a headset, you may examine its size and texture,” he explains. For advertisers, the power to debate complex visual elements using this 3D realism might help them “maintain full control over the industrial they're creating.”
Three years ago, within the midst of the Covid pandemic, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg sold a futuristic vision during which office staff would forgo each day commutes or lengthy Zoom calls and as an alternative placed on headsets daily and work in immersive virtual offices within the metaverse.
The then Facebook launched its own free app – Horizon Workrooms – that lets employees meet virtually. Zuckerberg argued that this was considered one of the “big use cases for VR.” Soon after, he renamed Facebook “Meta,” signaling how serious he was in regards to the metaverse push. In the months that followed, there was an explosion of interest and experimentation. In 2022, a PwC study published Opinion poll found that 51 percent of U.S. firms were either within the technique of integrating VR into their strategy or had already done so.
Many of those efforts flopped: start-ups offering virtual collaboration technologies went bankrupt, and bigger technology firms like Meta and its rival Microsoft needed to reduce or restructure their activities.
In February, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, announced shut down Hubs, its virtual work platform. In April, the parent company of Finnish virtual reality workplace startup Glue filed for bankruptcy. Another startup, Spatial, has shifted its focus to gaming.
Eric Shaffer, a pc science professor on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, argues that virtual and augmented technology, which promised to revolutionize the workplace, is within the second phase of a “cycle of hype and disillusionment.”
“It looks like we could also be at the underside of the curve,” he says.
But among the firms which have survived on this space at the moment are finding latest ways to integrate virtual reality technology into workspaces without expecting employees to wear headsets on a regular basis. Some are turning to a different high-profile technology – artificial intelligence – as a possible lifeline.
Meta, the missed its internal targets for user growth on its Horizon workplace app in the primary 12 months after launch and up to date job cuts at its loss-making metaverse division, is considered one of the businesses specializing in these opportunities. It says it has “quite a lot of long-term opportunities for AI within the metaverse with experiences that provide a better level of immersion and embodiment for consumers and businesses.”
Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, who has worked with Meta, expects “AI-powered avatars” and assistants to be the main target of metaverse creators, with features like real-time translation of discussions.
“The thing that's going to drive the metaverse within the office is AI,” says Christophe Mallet, CEO of Bodyswaps, a virtual reality soft skills training provider that works with 250 organizations. “The idea of a gathering assistant or productivity assistant – that's a technology that's more likely to integrate thoroughly into the metaverse and make an actual difference.”
Mallet envisions a virtual workplace “with real colleagues, but in addition AI assistants that will potentially be embodied in that office.” He says his company's growth has accelerated over the past 18 months “due to AI,” as it may possibly bring automated personalization to virtual training scenarios.
Christoph Fleischmann, founder and CEO of Arthur Technologies, a virtual office startup with 40 Fortune 500 clients, says that “AI is the last word eye candy.” As a theoretical example of future applications, he cites a finance team that might meet in VR and have an “incredibly intelligent AI interact directly with … data sources” and have the option to present that data in a visible and tangible way for participants.
“There are hundreds of thousands of such cases,” he says. “This is where AI and intelligent agents close the gap and enrich meetings with content.”
Optimists insist that priceless applications of VR technology in office environments include virtual brainstorming, simulations or training, for instance allowing users to have multiple screens visible at the identical time without having to have quite a few physical monitors.
Sondre Kvam, CEO and co-founder of Naer, a virtual brainstorming platform that lets users flesh out ideas using virtual sticky notes and whiteboards, says his company launched last 12 months as a partner of Meta's Quest headset and now has customers including Norway's largest financial services group, DNB. Longer term, the platform is additional features, comparable to allowing firms to gather data on who speaks essentially the most in meetings and to whom, to assist employers higher understand their employees and team dynamics. But, Kvam says, “there are some very real privacy concerns that you’ve to contemplate before constructing or designing something like this.”
Meanwhile, applications with spatial elements – for instance within the fields of design, engineering, architecture or urban planning – are gaining increasingly more fans, comparable to Stewart from the Bent Image Lab, where employees can, for instance, walk through a simulated constructing plan.
Working with VR can also be becoming more common in certain fields comparable to healthcare and engineering, where training applications could be particularly useful in dangerous or high-risk environments comparable to surgery or operating heavy machinery.
“The cost-benefit evaluation only is sensible if what you ought to train for falls into the 'dice' category – dangerous, not possible, counterproductive or expensive,” says Mallet of Bodyswaps.
A significant obstacle has been so-called headset penetration – the extent to which firms or users put money into VR or AR headsets – which has been slow to progress. “Work-related use tends to require higher specifications (for instance, when it comes to) screen resolution, battery life and processor power than leisure use – requirements that significantly increase the burden and value of the device, thus slowing adoption,” says Metaverse expert and investor Matthew Ball, adding that developers have due to this fact limited their investment in immersive app development. Meta, for instance, charges $1,119.99 for its latest VR headset, the Meta Quest Pro.
Jacob Loewenstein, senior vice chairman of business development and strategy at Spatial, says his company originally aspired to be Zoom's VR successor, but then shifted its focus to gaming after realizing that moving employees from their computers to a wholly latest device was only value it if it provided “incredible value.”
“I still think the headset is nowhere near comfortable enough for repeated or prolonged use,” says Loewenstein.
