Has Your Company 'Gone' Metaverse Yet?

Creating a presence today puts you at the head of the class and is just the right thing to do

There was a time when the Xerox copying machine was a “technology” that not all companies needed — or understood. Something similar occurred with computers. I recall internet connections were reserved only for the “toppest of the top” management and company founders. It wasn’t until I became a Chief Marketing Officer that I became one of the connected ones.

Thanks to the internet, emails became a must-have for company employees, while company sites were one of those things that many organizations endlessly discussed: Was it needed? How will a site “help us?” We are a B2B company, so why do we need a site? Sites eventually became the first step many new companies would take by the mid-2000s. 

It is 2023, and we are in the “era of the metaverse.” But are we? And if we are, what does that mean? Are companies creating their metaverse plans the way they did their “online push” back in the early 2000s? 

The FOMO year 

We all recall the year of the “great metaverse leap.” It was 2022, and thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s slightly naive and certainly over-enthusiastic tour into the future, way too many people, journalists, investors, and even some end-consumers came down with a case of FOMO (fear of missing out). 

FOMO is the pump that inflated the crypto world into the next big thing, only that next big thing never happened. Crypto is still out there, making money for some and losing a lot for others. It’s teetering. The technology that empowers it, the blockchain, gets almost no press these days, meaning many good blockchain projects still need funding but don’t get it. 

Something similar happened to metaverse projects in late 2022 and through 2023. Usurped by ChatGPT and other AI-fueled projects and bored by Zuckerberg’s premature prediction that it was time for everyone to buy a La-Z-Boy and become a nation of Wall-Es (from the classic film Wall-E), the air slowly seeped out of the metaverse bubble. 

The thing is, and this is a credit to the foundational importance of the metaverse, other than the silly, misinformed noise created by too many knowing too little about the possibilities of the metaverse, all is still well in the metaverse ecosystems. They are being built, and more and more companies are establishing their metaverse plans. Companies are slowly moving some of their operations over to the metaverse. 

The building goes on 

Thousands of companies around the world are engaging small to mid-sized development teams like, for instance, Mytaverse — a company at which I used to work — and with each passing week, month, and quarter, a persistent virtual space in which teams, colleagues, and even customers meet and engage has taken shape. The simple fact that most people don’t know about it demonstrates how mainstream this has become.

Companies are meeting prospective employees that reside in other states and countries in informal — and formal — virtual meetings, which, thanks to impeccable graphics and a real-time experience — the actual weather and time of day of the “place of the meeting” can be seen outside the window if you choose this — creates a genuine sense of “being together.” This first meeting in the metaverse serves as a test because it demonstrates a potential employee’s ability to deal with a new situation, such as being virtual for the first time, and how they respond to technology.

In other cases, thanks to digital twin graphics, which means something inside the metaverse is precisely identical to the item it represents outside the metaverse, companies, artists, and designers can invite customers to tour showrooms to browse. 

Companies with departments located in different parts of the country can also organize get-togethers in the metaverse. Hence, people get over the “nice to meet you” hump when first seeing each other. When the teams come together physically for an annual retreat, the awkwardness of first seeing each other is gone, and it’s easier to get down to business. 

What the metaverse is not trying to be 

I refer back to that exciting day when Zuckerberg made the video that launched a thousand ideas. People, including investors and tech enthusiasts everywhere, were left speechless by too many expecting what would be the new normal. Business, meetings with friends, family gatherings, and even dates were going to be going down in the metaverse. 

Many people were genuinely excited and couldn’t wait to get their avatars up and bounding from world to world. After all, that is one of the ultimate goals of the metaverse. You create an avatar, and that virtual being then moves freely between platforms with you guiding it. In some cases, thanks to artificial intelligence, the avatar lives a life while you are away — albeit this is very rare, and so far, I have never seen this in reality. 

As I said, expectations were high, too high, and that is why today, we are at a place where a lot of the expectations from 2022 have dissipated. What Zuckerberg was sharing was a glimpse of the future, and he was severely misunderstood. 

Zuckerberg aside, the men and women currently building the metaverse never promised anyone a rose garden — meaning, not one project ever aspired to transition humankind from reality to virtual reality. In my time with Mytaverse, one of the architects of the metaverse today, the goal was always to make the metaverse an add-on to reality. An opportunity to meet with colleagues and customers and even sometimes learn in close-knit and quaint settings virtually without traveling thousands of miles. 

One area where the metaverse is proving valuable while also lowering carbon footprints is exhibitions with heavy machinery. Rather than bring a $30-million crane halfway across the world to a show in Munich, Germany, for example, some exhibitors are inviting attendees into their virtual showrooms where they can see digital twins of those same cranes. The savings for the company not transporting the crane are tremendous, and from the standpoint of ESG (environmental, social, and governance), it is a great win.

The metaverse is not supposed to be this great flash-moment when suddenly everyone in the world awakes and finds themselves embedded in a virtual existence. In ways similar to so many other technological advances, the metaverse is going to be a gradual striding forward in humankind’s evolutionary cycle. The telephone put an end to telegraph operators. The car decreased the need for stables of horses. Electricity made fireplaces a luxury and not a necessity. Email has made mailing letters to convey greetings nearly obsolete. 

The metaverse will never replace reality, but it will provide ways around physical meetings when such meetings are neither necessary nor possible. The metaverse will enhance reality in ways that few could have ever imagined a camera would do to entertainment — these examples of technology’s effects on our “every day” are countless.

If you own a company, teach, create art, or just want to meet with family members who happen to live all around the world, a metaverse presence is a way to overcome physical space and be together, even if it is virtually. Most people who will read this article have never been on a metaverse. I am willing to bet that by the end of 2024, many will have spent at least a moment or two in a virtual expression of reality. 

As Buzz Lightyear used to say: To infinity and beyond!