It’s easy to get too in-the-weeds when it comes to the metaverse: an embodied, interconnected network that doesn’t exist yet. Right now, a “work metaverse” is best defined as a virtual office headquarters that you can navigate as a digital avatar. You might call it a multiplayer video game … except it’s where you’re supposed to get stuff done.
Plenty of people are skeptical about this way of working. It’s cool that you can turn your desk into a pirate ship and everything, but the idea of spending all your time as an avatar in a digital office is jarring. Still, some companies swear by these spaces, spending hours upon hours in their virtual HQs. In December, Protocol wrote about three of the big “work metaverse” companies and explored the feeling of these platforms.
But since the experience is so visual, we wanted to show you the “work metaverse” in video form, in all its usefulness and absurdity. Reporter Sarah Roach gets a taste of what it’s like to work in Gather's, Teamflow's and Virbela’s metaverses. In addition to wandering around and talking with co-worker Lizzy Lawrence, she races go-karts, draws on whiteboards and performs complicated dance routines.