Thinking of hibernating through the metaverse winter?

If you’re skeptical about dipping your enterprise’s virtual toes into a metaverse, rightfully so. While the roots of the metaverse date back more than 70 years, the concept gained instant credibility when it landed on Gartner’s 2022 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies with a “Plateau of Productivity’ timeframe of “more than 10 years.” Around the same time, Forrester’s Predictions 2023: The Metaverse and NFTs tempered widespread excitement and expectations with mention of a “metaverse winter” attributed to ”a volatile economy.”

While some investors and developers pulled back, others kept forging ahead, developing chips for augmented and virtual reality, trialing advertising through augmented reality, and “stockpiling gaming content,” according to CBInsights.

The “winter” analogy will be familiar to anyone involved with AI over the decades as interest and funding cooled and warmed in pendulum swings. During AI winters, devoted innovators persevered, even without concurrence about what AI was and is. And now, with the explosion of generative AI onto the scene and into use cases everywhere, those who persisted in understanding and investing in AI skills and supporting infrastructure and tools are being rewarded.

As with AI through the decades, there’s a lot of ongoing debate about what “the” or “a” metaverse is, including when and whether there will be a singular one. Even so, it’s clear that the technologies that enable it/them have continued to evolve. McKinsey & Company calls the metaverse “the next version of the Internet.” That scenario is believable, given ongoing advances in the underlying technologies.

Metaverses vs. internal enterprise immersive experiences

Experience tells us that waiting for the next big anything that could have tremendous impact on how our customers, employees, and partners relate to our organizations is not a prescription for long-term growth. Let’s break down some key differences between metaverses and internal enterprise immersive experiences to illustrate which are better suited for particular use cases today.  

Essential elements of a metaverse

In metaverses, users interact with each other and with digital representations of objects and environments in ways that feel relatively natural and intuitive. For example, Decentraland offers the ability to monetize your creativity, vote as a virtual citizen, participate in events, play games, and so on. In SuperWorld, you can purchase, sell, and trade virtual blocks of land that owners can customize. Want to own a park, a museum, or your hometown? Make an offer (if the plot is still available) and make it yours with content, get tickets to events, make ownership exchanges using nonfungible tokens, and more. Early metaverse experiences are primarily targeted at entertainment and gaming with in-app transactions, but more enterprises are getting into the zone with engaging experiences.

Typical metaverse experiences include:

• Collective virtual spaces: A metaverse is a virtual space where multiple digital experiences, use cases, and users can connect. The platforms are offered by third parties, and access is typically open to any user. While many metaverse spaces and platforms are springing up, the platforms are not yet interoperable.
• Experiences: Experiences are how metaverse users engage in the virtual world and with other users. Some examples are interacting in marketplaces to purchase virtual goods or services, playing games, exploring museums or gardens, touching or seeing 3D versions of objects, hiking, attending conferences or musical events, painting, and composing music. 
• Persistence: Persistence maintains the state of virtual assets, spaces, and data when users log out or leave the environment. It ensures that users can have a sense of ownership, progress, and continuity within the virtual world, making the metaverse feel more like an evolving reality rather than a transient experience.
• Alternate identities: Personas or representations of users in digital form enable anonymity, freedom of self-expression, collaboration, creativity, and social interaction.
• Transactions: Exchanging or transferring various forms of digital assets, such as currency and property, is a common feature of metaverse experiences. Users can buy, trade, sell, or gift virtual assets to other users or interact with virtual marketplaces where these transactions occur. Transactions can have real-world implications, as well, because some virtual assets, tokens that represent tangible assets, and currencies hold value in the real world.

How internal immersive experiences are different

Sometimes dubbed “intraverses” (a term used in many ways, so we will avoid it here), today’s internal immersive experiences help organizations accomplish specific tasks, such as employee development, onboarding (learning the culture, policies, facilities), team building, safety training, innovation, quality control, marketing, and so on. These are some of the typical characteristics of internal enterprise immersive environments:

• Localized or closed virtual spaces: Spaces are often limited to a geographic location, intranet, or similar “closed” space rather than on the open Internet.
• Experience focus: Experiences are usually focused on specific enterprise objectives or activities within a defined group (training, how to accomplish a task in real time, physical therapy, safety and compliance training, and so on). The goal is to provide a memorable interactive environment.  
• Lack of persistence: The persistence of an identity across sessions may or may not be necessary, depending on the use case. For example, for enterprise training or physical therapy or the exploration of a museum or art gallery by visitors who return frequently, persistence may be helpful to track past experiences or progress. In other cases, where experiences are isolated, persistence may not be important.
• Identities: Because enterprise experiences are often tied to the real-world identities of customers, employees, patients, or students, alternate identities may not be helpful.
• Limited transactions: Transactions are typically not a requirement in these types of use cases. Depending on the use case, metaverse and internal enterprise experiences may work from a user screen or be paired with augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) devices, such as headsets, smartphones, and tablets with cameras and appropriate software, haptic feedback devices, large-scale simulators, intelligent helmets, etc. You can start slow and build in new technology components over time.

Recommendations

If your enterprise is reluctant to experiment with a full-blown metaverse-type experience, creating internal experiences is a lower risk, lower investment choice to build skills, guidelines, vendor relationships, processes, and infrastructure so you can mature capabilities over time while metaverse-specific capabilities grow.

Consider creating a virtual team to explore use cases. At various points in the process, the team should include skills in these areas: product management, information governance, data management, data science, user interface/user design, cybersecurity, legal, software development, content creation, and business analysis. Marketing is essential for any customer-facing uses.

A valuable first step for the team is to develop an understanding of the “state-of-the-art” by reaching out to providers who build these experiences. Asking for examples of their work will uncover a wide range of possibilities.

Whether you choose to take the plunge on the metaverse or internal enterprise immersive experiences or wait for a generative AI-style ramp, the metaverse is forming. Every organization should get its digital and physical assets ready to be leveraged in these use cases.

Read this research paper, AI in the Information-Rich Enterprise, from analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy to gain their perspective. Learn more at Optimize your digital future with a unified asset strategy.