Would you work in the ‘metaverse’?

Not sat­is­fied with dom­i­nat­ing our online lives, Face­book – now rebrand­ed as Meta – plans to merge the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal worlds into what it is call­ing the meta­verse.

Dur­ing the company’s annu­al Con­nect con­fer­ence yes­ter­day (28 Octo­ber), CEO Mark Zucker­berg described the meta­verse as a place where “you’ll be able to do almost any­thing you can imag­ine — get togeth­er with friends and fam­i­ly, work, learn, play, shop, cre­ate”. 

In prac­tice, it appears the meta­verse will be a vir­tu­al space — accessed through vir­tu­al real­i­ty head­sets — where peo­ple can inter­act, con­nect and col­lab­o­rate with oth­ers. And that does­n’t just mean at home or while gam­ing, but at work as well. Exam­ples of how this could apply to the hybrid work­place include dig­i­tal office envi­ron­ments where avatars of col­leagues can work togeth­er, VR work setups to reduce dis­trac­tions and the abil­i­ty to use appli­ca­tions like Slack or Drop­box while in a vir­tu­al space. 

The social media giant has explored some of these ideas before, for exam­ple Hori­zon Work­rooms lets users of its Ocu­lus head­sets hold meet­ings in VR, but the vision of work­ing with­in the meta­verse pre­sent­ed at the con­fer­ence appears to be all encom­pass­ing.

Mario Ram­ic, founder of Take­away Real­i­ty, an AR and VR agency, claims that Facebook’s idea of a meta­verse could even­tu­al­ly suc­ceed the inter­net and bridges the gap between in-per­son and remote work­ing. He says: “It rep­re­sents a halfway point between a Zoom call, which can be quite imper­son­al, and a phys­i­cal meet­ing. For busi­ness­es that want to improve the remote work expe­ri­ence even more this tech­nol­o­gy can elim­i­nate the lack of social inter­ac­tion, which is its biggest down­side.”

How­ev­er, Justin Par­ry, COO of vir­tu­al real­i­ty train­ing provider Immerse, believes this could be a step too far for busi­ness­es, cer­tain­ly for some time. He says: “The enter­prise offer­ing of the meta­verse is incred­i­bly broad and could involve peo­ple spend­ing half of their day jump­ing into a VR head­set. From my per­spec­tive, we’re quite far away from that mod­el at the moment.”

Although he admits the buzz the announce­ment has cre­at­ed is pos­i­tive for the the indus­try, he ques­tions how long it will take for the con­cept to take hold. “There are a num­ber of com­pa­nies that are real­ly tak­ing this tech­nol­o­gy seri­ous­ly but it’s cer­tain­ly not the major­i­ty,” Par­ry says. “It’s not at that lev­el of matu­ri­ty yet where you could see this becom­ing some­thing that every employ­ee would have, so it’s very bold for Face­book to be push­ing that vision.”  

What’s the meta with Facebook?

Anoth­er con­cern for busi­ness­es will be around pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty. Ear­li­er this week, Face­book whistle­blow­er Frances Hau­gen warned MPs that Face­book is “unques­tion­ably mak­ing hate worse”. The leaked doc­u­ments she released out­lined how the tech company’s focus on engage­ment is ampli­fy­ing divi­sion, polar­i­sa­tion and “under­min­ing soci­eties around the world”.

In light of the meta­verse announce­ment, con­cerns have also been raised around the amount of data VR tech­nolo­gies can gath­er about a user. An individual’s phys­i­cal response, actions and body lan­guage could all be trans­lat­ed into data for Facebook’s dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing algo­rithms to analyse.

Under the rebrand, Face­book’s cor­po­rate name will change to Meta. The com­pa­ny hopes that the new name will bet­ter encom­pass the busi­ness­es future ambi­tions as it looks to expand beyond social media. Its cur­rent plat­forms, includ­ing Face­book, Insta­gram and What­sApp, will keep their cur­rent names.

Face­book will hope that its rebrand will help draw atten­tion away from cur­rent crit­i­cisms, but it rais­es the ques­tion of whether busi­ness­es will want to con­tin­ue to use its ser­vices – irre­spec­tive of the name it comes pack­aged under.

Despite these con­cerns, Glob­al­Da­ta tech­nol­o­gy ana­lyst Rupan­tar Guha doesn’t think this will impact adop­tion of this tech­nol­o­gy in the work­place. “The chal­lenges Face­book is fac­ing right now are focused on the con­sumer side of the busi­ness. Even if busi­ness­es are scep­ti­cal, if the tech­nol­o­gy it pro­vides can help them grow and, in this case, rev­o­lu­tionise their oper­a­tions, they will adopt it. How­ev­er, any busi­ness that does will have to pay close atten­tion to the data that is going to Face­book.” 

Par­ry adds: “There are com­pa­nies that will not be entire­ly com­fort­able with hav­ing to use a Face­book or Meta login for their oper­a­tions. If they find a way to bring users in with­out using the Face­book ID, that will get around that. But there is seri­ous ten­ta­tive­ness in the mar­ket about hav­ing to go all-in with Face­book to ful­ly sign up to its ecosys­tem.”

If Zuckerberg’s vision of employ­ees don­ning a VR head­set is to become a real­i­ty, the com­pa­ny will have to address some of these con­cerns with its busi­ness cus­tomers. And even so, with a ten-year timescale on Facebook’s new project, it may still be a while before we’re greet­ing our col­leagues in the meta­verse.