At the end of June Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to his employees his new ambition for his company: “Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse.” The ambition comes out at an interesting timing, a package of bills is coming to congress trying to tear the company apart by spinning out Instagram and WhatsApp and limit Facebook’s ability to make future acquisitions.
So What Is Metaverse?
Metaverse, as the Venture Capitalist Matthew Ball pointed out, is an experience that spans the physical and virtual worlds, within which there’s a fully functioning economy. The “unprecedented interoperability” furthermore allows users to trade or transfer goods among each other regardless of who “runs the particular parts of it.” In short, Metaverse, as Zuckerberg introduced, is “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it”.
The interactive and interrelated nature of metaverse gave Facebook an advantage to explore this new realm, which is also one of the reasons why the company invests so much in VR and AR technology. Zukerberg mentioned in the interview with Verse that metaverse gave Facebook a new opportunity to shape how people should interact in the digital realm “ People aren’t meant to navigate things in terms of a grid of apps. I think we interact much more naturally when we think about being present with other people.”
Future of Corporate Learning In the Metaverse
This exciting announcement sheds light on the future of corporate learning. It is especially promising to transform the experience of learning from experts and industry leaders, participating in workshops, and making it more engaging. Learning in the metaverse may be a more time and cost-efficient way compared to learning in real life as it saves much transportation cost both in time and money. Executives can just sit down in their office, waving their hands, and have the monitors they need to set up and attend the events that may take place in another part of the world.
Metaverse would also improve the quality of learning. Executives can learn from experts anywhere in the world. Instead of attending video sessions, experts could be teleported to wherever the executives are and deliver their knowledge in their holograms. The experience of learning will also be hugely improved. The executive could not only attend virtual sessions that deliver the same immersed experience as physical sessions. Metaverse could also help their learning to be more efficient. Imagine during the learning sessions, the expert talks about an interesting case study, and the executive can just wave his or her hand and set up a new dashboard to search for more information on that particular subject.
Challenges Ahead
Promising as this sounds, the concept of the metaverse is still a futuristic idea as there are a few technological challenges for Facebook to tackle. As Zuckerberg said, “you’re basically cramming all of these materials to build what we would’ve thought of as a supercomputer 10 years ago into the frame of glasses that are about five millimeters thick.” However, the future may not be so far away from us. Zuckerberg envisioned Facebook to conquer the challenges by the end of this decade. The interoperability and portability nature of metaverse may also accelerate the progress, just like Facebook and Instagram today, the software Facebook developed for people to meet and hang out in the metaverse can go across any VR/AR platform.
Another challenge lying ahead is how to help users to gain technical knowledge to navigate the metaverse. In corporate learning, the challenges posed are how to design the virtual classroom or workshop that is easy to operate for both the executives and the speakers who are going to deliver the learning sessions. Also, this new digital learning realm may require new teaching methodologies to help executives fully gain the benefits of the immersive and interactive nature of metaverse.