While the concept of the Metaverse can be complex and confusing, it is not hard to imagine the benefits it will bring to an enterprise. In Applying the Metaverse to the Enterprise, I talked about how a Metaverse is nothing more than real life in digital form. Let us now look at what life inside a Metaverse will look like.
The 4 Key Capabilities of the Metaverse
A Metaverse will allow for individual validation within a corporate environment through the association of four key capabilities:
Digital Built Environment. The digital built environment is the representation of the physical surroundings that provide the setting for human activity. A Metaverse provides a powerful, online, 3-D and 4-D representation of the physical workplace.
Interaction. Inhabitants of a Metaverse are known as avatars or residents. They can be representatives of staff or customers; and personalise an individuals’ interaction with the information being sought.
Navigation. Natural search occurs when the capability exists to spatially move an avatar through a digital environment. Today, the power of spatial search is self-evident and highlighted through applications such as Google Maps.
Collaboration. Social and information networks are created when two or more parties can openly and freely exchange information. They are also the basis of contemporary, decentralised digital economics (e.g., blockchain). Organisations are increasingly moving to incorporate emerging social technologies into traditional collaboration environments for decades.
The choice of a Metaverse would seem obvious for large organisations looking to move away from a process view of information. Building or construction analogies are already used to deal with the abstraction of information within their complex physical environments. It is, for example, a key principle of enterprise architecture. As a result, the decision to utilise a metaverse as a channel is ultimately not a big call.
The Metaverse will Require a Paradigm Shift
As a presentation layer, a Metaverse makes navigation and discovery easier and more intuitive. Adopting this new approach would allow a completely social and familiar way to interact with information. It would provide organisational benefits beyond the current capabilities of traditional data and process-driven environments and become the catalyst for major differences in the treatment of enterprise information. The interactive context of a Metaverse will also require differences in the way information is expressed.
Although the tech industry is strewn with concepts of “exchange” and “collaboration”, such terms are really actions that occur after an audience has engaged with the content. The Metaverse approach potentially addresses this challenge by first getting users comfortable with their environment before encouraging them to interact in it with others. Using these differences as key drivers, the creation of a Metaverse can focus on delivering a platform for personalised information discovery, specific to the responsibilities and opportunities for individuals within an organisation or broader ecosystem.
This is just one example of the Metaverse and enterprise. There are many others. For example, think about fully integrated asset management platforms used by retail property groups or airport corporations. The Metaverse will now allow these organisations to commercialise their full physical retail assets in a digital metaverse by offering tenants both a physical store and a digital store. Or even offer the digital space to a whole new portfolio of different tenants. The commercial upside of such models is significant and sure to drive investment.
Overcoming the challenges of introducing a new information delivery channel seems like a difficult transformation choice today. Ultimately, this is the transition choice of Web 3.0. It is one that acknowledges that existing process-oriented channels will fail to meet the primary drivers and demands underpinning the growth of the new Web 3.0 world: individualism, personalisation, and decentralisation.
Yes, virtual reality environments are a super-appealing channel because of their immediate visual gratification, but behind that façade, the monetisation of physical, commercial data and the continual rise of infonomics is what it is all about.
