Business

Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices

AI assistants, training simulations and data tracking boost developers

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg sold a futuristic vision in which office staff would shun their daily commute or tedious Zoom calls to instead don headsets daily and work in immersive virtual offices in the metaverse. Photograph: Getty Images

Hannah Murphy
Thu Jun 13 2024 - 06:00

Over the course of a few months last year, Trever Stewart painstakingly scanned his media company’s half-acre animation studio and replicated it in the metaverse. He is now starting to invite advertising agency clients into this virtual space for meetings so they can see how their animated content is made – from within.

“The metaverse is a grossly, grossly huge failure – but man did [companies such as Meta] build the tools so we can construct a new world right now!” says Stewart, associate producer of special projects at Bent Image Lab. “It’s bananas.”

“In a headset, say you take a mayonnaise jar in your hand, you are able to investigate the size and texture,” he explains. For advertisers, the ability to discuss complex visuals assisted by this level of 3D realism can help them to “have full control over the commercial they’re making”.

Three years ago, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg sold a futuristic vision in which office staff would shun their daily commute or tedious Zoom calls to instead don headsets daily and work in immersive virtual offices in the metaverse.

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What was then Facebook launched its own free app – Horizon Workrooms – that allows employees to gather virtually, with Zuckerberg arguing this would be one of the “big use case[s] for VR”. Soon after, he renamed Facebook “Meta”, signalling his seriousness about the metaverse push. In the months that followed, there was an explosion of interest and experimentation. In 2022, a PwC survey found that 51 per cent of US companies were either in the process of integrating VR into their strategy, or had already done so.

Many of these efforts have been a flop, with start-ups that offered virtual collaboration technology folding and larger tech groups, such as Meta and its rival Microsoft, cutting back or restructuring.

In February, Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, announced it would be shutting down Hubs, its virtual working platform. In April, the parent company of Finnish virtual reality workspace start-up Glue declared bankruptcy. Another start-up, Spatial, has switched its focus to gaming.

Eric Shaffer, computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, argues that the virtual and augmented technology that promised to power a workplace revolution is in the latter part of a “cycle of hype and disillusionment”.

“It feels like we are maybe at the bottom of the curve,” he says.

But some of the companies that have survived in the space are now finding new opportunities to integrate virtual reality technology into workspaces without expecting workers to wear headsets constantly. Several are turning to another much-hyped technology – artificial intelligence – as a potential lifeline.

Meta, which missed its internal targets for user growth on the Horizon workplace app in its first year after launch and recently made job cuts in its loss-making metaverse division, is one of the companies focusing on these opportunities. It says it has “a number of long-term opportunities for AI in the metaverse with experiences that deliver greater levels of immersion and embodiment for consumer and businesses”.

Cortney Harding, founder and chief executive of Friends with Holograms, who has worked with Meta, says she expects “AI-powered avatars” and assistants to be a focus for metaverse-builders, with capabilities including real-time translation of discussions.

“The thing that is going to fuel the metaverse in the office is AI,” says Christophe Mallet, chief executive of Bodyswaps, a virtual reality soft skills training provider that works with 250 organisations. “The idea of having a meeting or productivity assistant – that is technology that is likely to integrate very well with the metaverse, to make a real difference.”

Mallet envisages having a virtual workplace “with real colleagues but also AI assistants that potentially would be embodied in that office”. He says his company’s growth has accelerated over the past 18 months “because of AI” as it can bring automated personalisation to their virtual training scenarios.

Christoph Fleischmann, founder and chief executive of Arthur Technologies, a virtual office space start-up with 40 Fortune 500 clients, says that “AI is the ultimate eye candy”. As a theoretical example of future use, he points to a finance team that might meet in VR and have an “incredibly smart AI interacting directly with ... data sources”, and be able to project that data visually in a tangible way for participants.

“There’s a million of these cases,” he says. “This is where AI and intelligent agents bridge the gap and enrich meetings in terms of content.”

Optimists insist that valuable applications for VR technology in office environments also include virtual brainstorming, simulations or training, as well as enabling users to have multiple screens visible at once without having to have numerous physical monitors, for example.

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Sondre Kvam, chief executive and co-founder of Naer, a virtual brainstorming platform where users can thrash out ideas using virtual sticky notes and whiteboards, says his business launched last year as a partner of Meta’s Quest headset and now has clients including Norway’s largest financial services group, DNB. In the longer term, the platform is exploring adding features such as enabling companies to gather data on who speaks the most in meetings and to whom, helping employers better understand their staff and team dynamics. But, Kvam adds, “there’s some very real concerns about privacy that you’d need to take into account before building or shaping anything like that”.

Meanwhile, applications where there is a spatial element – such as design, engineering, architecture or urban planning – are winning over fans such as Stewart at Bent Image Lab, offering the ability for staff to walk in a simulated building plan, for example.

Working in VR is also becoming more common in certain sectors such as healthcare and engineering where training applications can be useful, particularly in dangerous or high-stakes environments such as surgery or operating heavy machinery.

“The cost-benefit analysis only makes sense if what you are trying to train for falls in the ‘Dice’ category – dangerous, impossible, counterproductive or expensive,” says Mallet of Bodyswaps.

One big barrier has been so-called headset penetration – the extent to which companies or users are investing in VR or AR headgear – which has been slow. “Work-related use tends to require higher specifications, [for example around] screen resolution, battery life, processor power, than leisure use cases – requirements that substantially increase the weight and cost of the device, thereby slowing adoption,” says metaverse expert and investor Matthew Ball, adding that developers have limited their investment in building immersive apps as a result. Meta is charging businesses $1,119.99 for its latest VR headset, the Meta Quest Pro, for example.

Jacob Loewenstein, senior vice-president of business development and strategy at Spatial, says his company initially aimed to become the VR successor to Zoom but shifted to gaming after it became clear that getting workers to switch from their computer to an entirely new device was only worth it if there was “crazy value”.

“I still think that the headset is not nearly comfortable enough for any repeat or prolonged use case,” says Loewenstein. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024

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