I blogged last week about WFH trends, including “socialization” and “interaction” effectiveness that seem to impact both enterprise policy on WFH and worker interest in the concept. It’s hard to say how much these factors suppress WFH, but my chats with enterprises suggest they do. What could make WFH more broadly acceptable? How about the metaverse? Or, should we expect to see a return to the office?
From the outside looking in at Meta’s seminal vision, a metaverse is a virtual world that people inhabit and interact in and through. I’ve called this a “social metaverse” to distinguish it from a “metaverse of things” (MoT) or “industrial” metaverse, which are really digital twins of real-world systems of things more than of people. However, all metaverses, including the social kind, are really a kind of digital twin in that they have to synchronize the representations of real world elements with their real-world counterpart.
In a social metaverse, which we’ve had around for some years (think “Second Life”, now seen as a kind of self-authoring multi-player game), and in gaming in general, we represent people as avatars that move around and behave (including converse) as the person they represent wants them to. In gaming and other manifestations, the avatar behavior is controlled by the person, but it typically isn’t synchronized with their real-world actions but rather is controlled with keys or joysticks. This means that these social metaverses aren’t “natural” reflections of behavior, which in turn means that subtle behaviors we could exhibit in the real world, like facial expressions, may not be easy to reflect to our avatar. It also means that we can deliberately make our avatars look like we want them to, essentially falsifying our real condition and behavior.
Meta and others, having found it’s difficult to monetize a true social-media type of metaverse, have taken aim at specialized missions like education. I’ve only dabbled in this a couple of times as an exercise, but I’ve found that while you can in fact fairly easily create a realistic “classroom” or “lecture hall” or even “meeting” scenario with metaverse technology, the lack of a truly effective link between persons an avatars reduces the benefit. In meeting, in particular, where body language is cited most often as a clue in optimizing interpersonal dynamics, it’s almost like letting everyone at a real meeting be represented by a mannequin that can “speak” and “see” but presents a blank face and doesn’t move.
People who use Teams, Zoom, or another video collaboration tool regularly generally say that the biggest problem with the tools is that they don’t provide social feedback effectively when the size of the group involved is more than perhaps half-a-dozen people. In most cases, it’s difficult to give each person enough screen space on the other’s screens to allow expressions to be analyzed. In fact, screen space is one of the factors that determines the accuracy associated with representing any virtual world.
We see, in the real world, a field that’s almost 180 degrees horizontally and 110 vertically. Even a large monitor takes up only about a sixth of that, and a laptop monitor as little as a quarter of that sixth, or about 5% of the real field. I’ve seen tests of technology for social metaversing that let people see more by turning their head or moving their eyes, but all of these tended to make me dizzy, though I think it might be possible to get used to them based on what gamers say. The point is that we almost surely face a major cost and a major period of adaptation to create a virtual world that can reasonably mimic a real meeting.
But do we have to, to enhance WFH? The workers I chat with, mostly technical/managerial, all say that they feel “more connected” on a video chat then with only audio. Almost 90% say that they feel more connected in a physical meeting than in a virtual one conducted with the collaboration tools their companies use. A slightly smaller number say that they think physical meetings are more efficient and produce better decisions. Some of this attitude might fade if we had a social-metaverse tool available, combined with technology to display the metaverse in more of our visual field and to synchronize avatar and person better. One company experimenting with this told me that they estimated it would cost about three thousand dollars per remote worker to properly set up for this.
It seems to me that the problem, or the trade-off, is pretty clear. We can garner enough social-metaverse realism to make it effective, but to do so raises the cost to the point where it’s not clear if there would be a payback. Or, we can accept a less-than-realistic virtual meeting that requires no additional gear or cost, but at the risk of not enhancing WFH potential at all.
One way to try to resolve this conflict might be to address expectations. Enterprises agree that a social metaverse that created a virtual office that looked much like the real one, and that would support both interactions and supervision, would make them “consider” adopting WFH as a broad option for employees. What less than that clearly utopian goal would still make them look more favorably on WFH generates no consensus at all at the high level, but there are some interesting points that do come out of the “how much is enough” question.
One is that an avatar system is preferred over an actual video image, because it’s seen as protecting privacy and reducing legal risks. However, enterprises themselves offer estimates of per-worker cost that average less than $500 per worker, a sixth of what suppliers who have actually researched the issue expect. Worse yet, enterprises say that the $500 cost would be too high.
The flip side of this is the impersonation issue; if avatars represent people at meetings, how do we know the people behind them are who we think they are? For metaverses to work in WFH, you need a watertight assurance of identities for those involved. This is one reason why expert estimates of per-worker cost tend to be higher than user estimates; experts see this sort of problem and factor in the cost of solving it.
Another point, perhaps the critical one, is that the barriers to metaverse WFH would be lower for people who regularly participated in virtual activities; gaming, online Teams/Zoom conferences, and even social media. I think this is already a factor; well over 80% of people told me they were “more receptive” to virtual office notions today than they were only a few years ago, and those who had a view on the notion a decade ago said they were “much more” receptive.
The final point is sustainability. It’s difficult to say how much energy could be saved, how much greenhouse gasses could be reduced, if every worker who could permanently work from home did do. Remember that every worker isn’t eligible, that reductions in energy costs for office work might be exceeded by new energy costs for equipping workers for WFH, that many office sites would likely have to continue to use power because of workers not able to work full time at home. I’ve tried to model this, but the big problem is that it’s impossible to know how rapidly a full-WFH-for-all-eligible could be brought about, and what the impact would be during the transition. I suspect it could make a difference, but I can’t prove it.
Where this leaves us, I think, is clear. We do not, at present, have a metaverse WFH concept that either workers or enterprises would buy into. Willingness will have to evolve as tools make people more comfortable with “virtual relationships”, and as facilities to support them become commonplace. Don’t look for WFH to sweep the business world unless an outside force like COVID comes along again.
