daily meeting. Your company might have a fun name, like Standup or Team Huddle. This is a necessary evil that most workplaces have to deal with. So if you find yourself thinking, “Wow, I hate these meetings.” Imagine having the same meeting in the metaverse. After all, some companies are embracing this as a “virtual” reality (laughter) and, unsurprisingly, it looks confusing.
report in slate (opens in new tab) (via The Bite) (opens in new tab) highlights issues plaguing some metaverse offices, from technical issues to employees’ unwillingness to engage with technology at all.
A junior manager at technology consulting firm Accenture shared with Slate the frustrating experience of simply hosting a meeting in the metaverse workspace. From the phone with the headset off he just had to get a two-factor code and the headset should automatically go into sleep mode. Some of her colleagues were absent from the meeting due to difficulty accessing their rooms.
Deploying a VR workplace at Accenture. Accessibility issues have occurred for some employees. Some reported motion sickness when using the headset, or were unable to use it all due to their disability. not.
The same employee told Slate that most of her co-workers don’t use headsets much, deriding everything as “a low-fidelity Minecraft virtual happy hour.”
Rahul Mehra, co-founder of Roadcast, an India-based automation company, said, “Internet bandwidth slowdowns in South and Southeast Asia, consistent compatibility across different brands of hardware “Lack of software” is his company’s problem.
He also said more senior members of his company were simply not happy with the technology. He says the inclusion will make his company look “very forward-thinking” to people he’s looking to hire.
The story is that VR approaches at work run into the same problems as others, like colleagues forgetting to charge or update their headsets, or having problems sharing their screens from their desktops for meetings. This leads to Slate’s own problem of
David Stern, founder of Slate Group Supporting Cast, sent headsets to a handful of remote employees for meetings and the occasional VR hangout. He said, “I’m not sure if it’s good for meetings, especially if you’re doing a lot of screen sharing to see someone’s desktop,” and these virtual meetings “encourage open conversations and brainstorming. Stern concedes that most employee headsets are used for “social gatherings,” adding that “productivity-centric use cases are still being decided. It has not been done.”
The most popular metaverse workplaces are meta horizon workroom (opens in new tab) It’s part of the larger Horizon Worlds metaverse. From 300,000 active users 200,000 in less than a year. (opens in new tab) Given John Carmack’s recent departure (opens in new tab)and recently with 11,000 employees laid off in November, Meta’s metaverse is in a very precarious position.
From a cost-saving perspective, you can feel the appeal of virtual workspaces. On paper, buying a headset and having an employee work with his three virtual monitors is cheaper than renting office space and buying physical monitors and miscellaneous office equipment. But if employees are having trouble just trying to attend a meeting in the Metaverse, it seems difficult to convince them to work an entire shift with their headsets on.VR Office is still in its early stages. .So meta just added legs to Horizon (opens in new tab) just a few months ago.
