Welcome to the metaverse – the virtual future of business?
This week saw the return of thousands of people to their offices in Irish cities and towns, many for the first time in 18 months. But it is a changed environment, with companies embracing digital technology to usher in a hybrid way of working.
Before coronavirus locked down the country, the idea that virtual communications could ever replace in-person meetings was something that only a few companies had embraced.
Things may be reopening, but there won’t be a wholesale return to the office of old. The digital transformation is irreversible, but the future doesn’t lie in endless Zoom or Teams calls, either. Rather, it may be a virtual world where your avatar interacts with others as if in person, providing a more effective way to network.
Welcome to the metaverse, a digital world that could soon be a hub for business and leisure.
The idea of the metaverse has been the subject of a number of books and movies, from its first appearance in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to the Oasis in Ready Player One and plenty more besides.
One Irish company is working hard to make the metaverse for business a reality. Waterford-based VR Education has seen its development accelerated in recent months as companies have turned to new technologies to create a better way of collaborating.
VR Education was founded in 2014 by chief executive David Whelan and his wife, Sandra, the company’s chief operating officer.
Whelan’s interest in virtual reality was sparked after he backed Oculus’s original Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. As soon as he put on the headset, he knew that he wanted to get into virtual reality.
Immersive VR Education, as it was known then, was started with a €1,000 loan from Whelan’s sister in 2014. In 2018 the holding company listed on the stock markets in London and Dublin, raising £6 million.
The company’s original focus was making virtual reality experiences that brought viewers to the Apollo missions or enabled them to explore the Titanic. But soon the company turned its hand to building the Engage platform, offering educators a better, more immersive education experience.
“It is a bit of a head trip for new people when they get it,” he said.
For VR Education, the pandemic has been a boon for business. The company had envisaged a more gradual adoption of Engage until the coronavirus outbreak shut down businesses all over the world.
“We were thinking three to five years is what the adoption of digital collaboration would take,” said David Whelan. “Then Covid hit and it happened within five weeks. It wasn’t just schools, it was all different types of organisations, and we’re seeing that continue even though vaccinations are going quite well.”
Those tools developed for the classroom, Whelan says, will work well for enterprise users, too. The company has held events for large companies in a virtual world, and so far, it has worked well – holding an event inside an arcade cabinet such as Wreck it Ralph, for example.
“With the events, especially with these big large blue-chip companies, they’ve been using Zoom and Microsoft Teams for events. All that happens is you’re watching PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation – the only interaction is a question and answer at the end, which is often text-based,” he says.
“The real reason people go to events is to go and meet someone – a chance meeting where you spark up conversation and hopefully that leads to business or you go talk to a sales person in an exhibition hall. That stuff we can do on Engage because we have spatial audio; you can get up out of your seat, walk down the corridor or have a private conversation with somebody and that real natural interaction is something that we do that these video platforms can’t do.”
The company now has more than 130 corporate customers for its technology.
