Floating through the metaverse
Reflections on the metaverse and experiments in empathetic VR.
Since Meta launched their vision for the metaverse at the end of last year, there has been a lot of discussion, debate, and head-scratching about what it all actually means. Is it a reveal of our near-term future or an elaborate smokescreen to shift focus from the company’s troubles? Is it part of Web3.0? Accenture recently announced that they have purchased 60,000 of the Oculus 2 headsets for training and collaboration. Mine arrived in December and after using it for a few weeks, I thought I would share some initial thoughts.
Mind the gaps
It’s clear that Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse is a long way off from where we are today. That’s fine, it can be very helpful to paint a picture of what the future might look like. It helps us understand, analyse and try out a new reality before it becomes real. I do have a few questions however about the inherent feasibility and desirability of some aspects of what was shown.
First off, when we talk about the metaverse, let’s agree this is just virtual reality rebranded. Secondly, there seems to be a lot of people conflating the metaverse and Web 3.0. I don’t see any hard evidence why this is the case — I suspect it’s more a matter of timing than any particular synergy between the ideas. I could of course be way off with these (and they may date badly!) but I believe when you cut through the noise and hype of all the discussions to date, I don’t think there’s actually that much left.
One reason why I believe this is the case is that Zuckerberg’s vision presented ‘the metaverse’ as a singular location, a place where a person’s digital identity would persist across multiple applications — a potentially compelling idea. Sure, I had reservations about Meta being the guardians of this identity but from an experience perspective, it was interesting.
Something I have found in my experience using the Oculus Quest 2 so far is that this is far from the case. Many apps — from Horizon’s (Meta-owned) Workspace & Venues to AltSpace and RecRoom — require distinct identities/avatars and login procedures. It turns out that many of the problems that we face in our screen-based interactions today have followed us into VR. Navigating metaverse is just as disjointed and laborious as using the internet today. In some cases, problems have been further amplified by VR.
Some of these, like logins, input, and security, are quite technical and resolvable in time. Others however are more systemic. Anonymized identities, common across VR, provide a shield for people to hide behind, enabling them to be whomever they want and do whatever they want — without consequence. We have of course seen how this plays out across social media. In VR however, the hostility is heightened due to the immersive nature of the medium. I have had people (probably kids!) shouting at me while playing paintball and there have even been examples of sexual harassment that probably won’t be the last. Walking around Horizon’s Venue experience felt more like being in Las Vegas than the wholesome vision that was presented.
It’s still early days with this medium and some challenges are better framed as opportunities. Take content creation and management for example. A lot of the interaction models in VR simply replicate how we create and manage content online today. It’s almost like a new form of digital skeuomorphism, where VR references the affordances of our digital desktop environments. This works well in some cases, like menu navigation, where it feels natural and intuitive. Other areas, such as accessing files and creating content is where the cracks start to show. I believe there is a wide-open space for people to create more intuitive VR native experiences that take better advantage of the medium. Noda and Gravity Sketch are examples of apps that do this well.
From novelty to utility
Creating your own little corner of the internet has been a killer use case since the early days. Going back to Geocities, MySpace, and early blogging platforms such as WordPress — the ability for non-technical people to easily create and publish content online is an important part of what enabled the internet as we know it today. This equivalent doesn’t exist in VR yet. The barriers to content creation are high. We of course have examples of apps like Minecraft and Roblox that are not just breaking these barriers down but are also opening up new and interesting business models.
Virtual Reality to date has been defined primarily by games. The big question, however, as Ben Evans articulates very well, is ‘if games can break out of games’. For VR (and the Metaverse) to gain any real traction, it needs to move beyond the novelty-focused applications that define it today. Early examples such as Horizon Workrooms show promise and the experience suggests that there could be a new productivity paradigm in the making.
What works well
Despite the fact that there are lots of bugs and challenges in current VR experiences, it’s clear that there are some areas where it really excels as a medium. Artists like Goro Fujita are creating some incredible 3D illustrations and animations in VR. The car/industrial design community is experimenting with the medium for 3D modeling, although I’m skeptical as to whether this will breakthrough as a true replacement to current methods any time soon. These examples show that for certain applications, this direct input model of interaction has the potential to open up entirely new ways of working and collaborating. There are warning signs, however. Google’s Tilt Brush 3D sketching product was hailed as one of the early success stories but this has since been discontinued, citing a lack of progress in the market.
Remote collaboration is another area where VR shows a lot of promise. Having tried a few options such as AltSpace, Horizon Workrooms, Spatial, and others — I found that the majority are still too limited or clumsy to be true productivity enhancers. With the exception of Workrooms, most are fine for social interaction and casual conversations but the moment you need to do some real work, they start to fall short very quickly. The ability to bring your device into Workrooms is quite magical and the whiteboard features work surprisingly well. Interacting with others has a natural flow and the interaction bugs that exist in other apps appear to be getting smoothed out. I could imagine this model extending for a user’s phone too, where you could bring it into your virtual space (across apps) and use it as an alternative input device for text input, authentication, and more.
A killer feature that I think is under-discussed is the audio experience in VR — particularly for remote collaboration. AltSpace uses audio well as it replicates the real-world experience. Simply move closer to a person or a group to hear them more loudly. I found the out-of-the-box spatial audio experience very good. Hearing people beside me in VR talk from one side makes the experience that bit more natural and ultimately more comfortable.
The pass-through cameras on the Quest are another part of the experience that has not received much attention but show some promise for how they could significantly enhance the experience in the future. While the quality of the cameras is quite low today, you could imagine that if these were to improve, we could create a viable mixed-reality (AR+VR) that connects the real world in a much better way. Some people have already started experimenting, with interesting results.
While these experiments show some promise for how VR might develop, there are still some fundamental issues that I believe need to be addressed before it can gain mass adoption. Assuming we get around a lot of the technical issues like managing identities, text input, and navigation, one gap I still see is around how we can build a more empathetic experience.
Looking out, looking in — where to from here?
Like many others, I have been working from home for almost 2 years now. When I put on my VR headset today, it means I am cut off from this environment. I am essentially saying to others that I’m not available. This is fine if I’m dipping in and out but in order to become a truly viable tool for collaboration and productivity, I think there needs to be greater consideration given to how we can create a more inclusive experience. This means making the user more aware of what’s happening around them while also creating more awareness of the users’ experience for others in the vicinity. The image at the top of this article is a little experiment I did to show what this could look like. Imagine VR devices had a display on the outside that shows a (probably synthetic) representation of the user’s eyes that takes advantage of the rumored eye-tracking features in future updates. This, matched with a more nuanced pass-through camera experience could start to break down some of these walls that are making the experience prohibitive today.
So in summary, it’s still early days and I don’t think it’s clear that Meta’s vision will come to fruition any time soon. Maybe we are at the start of a new era of VR productivity — I remain open to the possibility but somewhat skeptical. In terms of predicting what’s ahead, that’s anyone’s guess. As Ben Evans says:
“The trouble is, it’s easy to make a cool concept video, but talking about [AR/VR] today in any kind of detail is like making detailed predictions about the mobile internet in 1999, or even 2005… AR and VR might be the next smartphone, but they might also be the next smart watch, drone, or games console — very cool but a narrow market.”
I’ll continue to share reflections as we try out this new medium with colleagues as it gets adopted for meetings, virtual collaboration sessions, and of course games.
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John Moriarty is a Design Director with Fjord at The Dock, Accenture’s global centre for Innovation. He works at the intersection of people and emerging technology, building new digital products and experiences for enterprise clients.
