![]() “I don’t think there’s an amount of money you can pay me to be in a VR headset 40 hours a week,” Virbela president Alex Howland said. ![]() Image: Pipo Saúde What does an office metaverse look and feel like?Īll agree that virtual-reality technology is not advanced enough to be the entry point for the office metaverse. You can access Gather and Teamflow on your web browser, whereas users download the Virbela software - though the company is working on a web-based offering called Frame. Virbela has a 3D design, letting you navigate through an office campus behind a full-bodied avatar. In Teamflow, you move around a modern-looking office as a floating circle of video. ![]() Gather looks like an old-school video game, with small, pixelated characters and a decorated 2D world. So these companies are building the next best thing: worlds you can move around in as a digital stand-in. The metaverse as an embodied, interconnected network doesn’t exist yet. “The transition to remote is going to be the most important economic transition since the Industrial Revolution.” “I think the future is bright,” said Teamflow CEO Florent Crivello. Fully remote work with perpetually available social interaction. Virbela, not a startup but a virtual world-builder since 2012, saw a 260% increase in revenue in the second quarter of 2020.įrom the perspective of the companies building digital offices, there’s only upside. Gather, founded in May 2020, has raised $77 million, and Teamflow has raised $50 million since its January 2021 launch. Some have earned serious money from big-name investors. Virtual office companies were getting a lot of traction even before the explosion of the word “metaverse.” With mass adoption of remote work, startups smelled opportunity. ![]() But as Protocol has previously noted: It’s the companies we’ve never heard of that are likely to make the work metaverse happen. Meta built Horizon Workrooms to hold meetings with Oculus headsets. Microsoft plans to integrate its VR/AR platform Mesh with Teams and hinted at future “immersive spaces” within the messaging app. It seems like everyone, from Big Tech to shiny new startups, wants in. But many are already doing it, aided by online world builders like Gather, Teamflow and Virbela. It may be hard to imagine a large swath of employees sitting in a virtual room and bumping into digital forms of their colleagues all day. It’s a new definition of the virtual office. Some major stakeholders want to improve remote and hybrid work by creating constant, digital spaces you can log into as some form of avatar. Most workers do not want to be in-person full-time, regardless of the pandemic and companies’ will-they-won’t-they office plans. A growing number of companies think the solution is the metaverse, but for work. "The thing with Rumii is you really feel like you're with other people, your brain just buys into that sense of team, and collaboration is a lot stronger than using video," Glasco says.VR has a lot of potential across a wealth of industries and bringing people together in ways video and phone calls simply can’t is just one impactful change the technology will be inspiring as virtual reality grows.Hybrid work is the future, even though sometimes it sucks. It uses VR’s high capability for social presence and immersion to make people really feel like they're together no matter how many miles apart they may be. Rumii, Doghead’s flagship VR meeting software, isn’t limited to virtual reality headsets and can be used on desktops, browsers, tablets, and phones. So you'll get that sense of scale, especially for things like engineering, that isn't captured very well just by using video technology." You could import a CAD file and walk through the house that you're working on. "Say you're an architect in New York and you have a client in London. "We are trying to bring you something totally different," Glasco says when discussing the potential of VR interaction.
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