Metaverse: The Future of Work

We've seen in the news recently that there is significant investment being made by organizations to develop the concept of a metaverse. A metaverse brings together the social, augmented, and virtual reality entities to create a persistent and shared virtual ecosystem that takes the Internet era to a whole new level. So what happens if we apply the metaverse concept to work? Let's explore a few scenarios.

The obvious first scenario will be a far more immersive meeting experience for colleagues to virtually join a meeting room through any device - a VR headset, AR glasses, an Alexa device or maybe just our humble PC.

Make that experience 3 dimensional and we will be left with virtual meeting rooms on which we are able to pin pictures or documents on a wall for us to walk around and look at. And even better, the persistence feature means the pictures will remain in place until they are taken down, allowing us to revisit the meeting room in future and remind ourselves of what happened. Even better, allow a guest to visit your past meeting and let them experience it without you being present.

Extend this even further and the interoperability of a metaverse allows us to pin any document from any application that we have access to in the organization. Imagine natively being able to share an SAP artefact and a SharePoint site next to each other overlaid by a Power BI dashboard and PowerPoint presentation all side by side on the same wall!

Security is important as always, and we need access to virtual keys to control who is allowed to enter the room.

At the end of a tough day of meetings, we can return home to our comfort zone, that we decorate the way we want, able to access the information we need in the home that we have designed ourselves. Even take a break and read the news or watch some Netflix style training videos in between meetings. We can even decorate the walls with our family photos to give it an even more personal experience.

Of course the experience will be different in AR vs VR vs PC. An AR environment would allow customisations of projections on walls within our physical home office. A PC customisation would be more akin to the current virtual desktop experience. A VR experience would be totally immersive in a virtual world.

There are lots of open questions still in my mind:

1. How does the social experience at work change when outside of meeting rooms?
2. How does this help with cross time zone collaboration?
3. What are the challenges in a hybrid working from home or office situation?
4. How do we control the impact this will have on our health and wellbeing?
5. What other security implications need to be considered?

Still lots of open questions but hopefully a glimpse into work in the future (5 to 10 years away).

What do you think? Please do share your thoughts!