Meeting in the Metaverse: a new place to work in

Online meetings find a new dimension.
Thanks to the Metaverse, they’ll be held in an immersive space where it’s possible to work and interact with colleagues, customers and suppliers without having to worry about the boundaries imposed by distance.

Communicating and collaborating to achieve a working result requires effort and attention from all participants. Finding common ground is a great challenge, and if also the distance comes into play, obtaining a valid output becomes inevitably complicated. These difficulties had been emerging especially during the lockdown, with DAD and smart working playing a leading role; solutions, these ones, that were effective in softening the emergency, but turned out to be unsuccessful over a longer term.

Exhausting both from the psychological and the physical point of view: this is the sentiment people have associated to videocalls and online meetings. In this regard, as previously dealt with in one of our articles, a new term, “Zoom fatigue”, was born to indicate the sense of tiredness and drop in attention caused by remote-controlled devices.

Potentialities of new evolving tools have been immediately implemented resulting in the overcoming of this sentiment, since they allow users to find themselves within a shared virtual environment, dominated by immersivity, where every kind of experience, meetings included, is turned into moments of interactivity and collaboration that are one-of-a-kind.

The Metaverse, hence, pushes the limits of 2d by providing workers with the tools that take to achieve the expected results. Physical distance is no more an obstacle: by joining the Metaverse, users plunge into a 3d environment which allows them to display the surroundings three-dimensionally, thus simulating a real meeting where people relate face-to-face to each other – just as it happens in the physical world.

TechStar product, Meta Presence®, points precisely in this direction. By means of MetaMeetings, it provides users with the possibility to live business-oriented virtual meetings as a moment of growth and collaboration. Environment’s definition, customized avatar and digital twins make MetaMeetings the perfect occasion to brainstorm, exchange ideas, share information, present a product or take strategic decisions.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF A VIRTUAL MEETING?

In the Metaverse, the user’s involvement is such as to give the impression of being in a real context, since VR employment, avatar use and platform functionalities contribute to blocking completely any external distractions and allow users to fully immerse themselves in the virtual world. This differentiates MetaMeetings from traditional calls, bringing significant benefits.

1. Immersivity boosts creativity and attention

According to a research led by Nature, videocalls represent an obstacle to creativity, since users decrease their visual range to the shared environment displayed on screen and this requests a more limited cognitive effort. 2d calls, thus, dim attention and interactivity, which are instead necessary to stimulate creativity and employees’ participation.

Unlike these platforms, MetaMeetings were conceived as workplaces capable of making participants feel part of the team and creating the right atmosphere through lights, background noise and environment-originated stimuli. The objective is to put users in a comfortable situation where to give free rain to their creativity, let themselves be inspired by the surroundings and feel free to express their own ideas. Moreover, the all-around involvement experienced in the Metaverse helps users to keep attention high on the meeting’s development and happenings, with active and steady participation.

2. Avatars make interaction realistic

Human communication is not only verbal, but goes along with a language that involves body and expressions. Their absence has a negative influence on 2d platforms’ experiences since these elements are essential to human interaction and comprehension. Gestures, posture, bust movements or, more simply, facial expressions make communication clearer and more involving, by catching the interlocutor’s attention. This is because the possibility offered to users to build and interact through their avatars makes the difference in a MetaMeeting. It’s thanks to the avatar that these aspects come to life, so to render the interaction not only more realistic, but also more direct and immediate.

3. View and sound are synchronized and three-dimensional

In the same old videocalls, users have to talk one at a time in order to understand and interact; MetaMeeting has no similar problems. Thanks to spatial audio, users can talk on top of each other without bothering the rest of them, rather than switching turns as it happens elsewhere. Besides, Metaverse’s three-dimensional aspect encourages products’ presentation, since the depth which distinguishes the virtual world helps to make the analysis of 3d models realistic. This allows participants to obtain much more detailed information than in a 2d context.

4. A significant reduction in terms of time and costs

Meeting in the Metaverse represents an opportunity for savings from several perspectives. For example, physically moving from a place to another implies the use of means of transport; hence, besides the expensive tickets, it’s also a matter of optimizing those hours of your day spent waiting for flights, working on train or driving the car. MetaMeetings change this scenery, because working comfortably from home means shortening the time as well as business travels’ budget. The Metaverse represents an opportunity also for people with limited mobility, since they can freely switch from a meeting to another without having to undergo the difficulties linked to physical movements.

Smart working is the new normal, that’s the reason why new technologies aim at making activities more engaging and effective. Metaverse complies with that, as through virtual meetings it manages to fill two significant shortcomings present in 2d platforms: the sense of belonging and the sense of presence, which are essential for the involvement of participants.

Virtual world’s potentiality, thus, is not about the only external communication of a company, but also represents an opportunity to improve the internal one among its employees.