What do we mean by the metaverse?

We spoke to Peter Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Salesforce, who feels that to a certain extent, we are already living and working in a metaverse, just one without the headsets.

Why, in your view, has the idea of the Metaverse gained so much traction recently?

Well, as you know, it’s an old idea. Neal Stephenson (coined the term Metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash) is a good friend. I actually tried virtual reality with Jaron Lanier and Esther Dyson back in 1991. So the interesting question is why now, given this idea and technology in various forms has been around for about 30 years?

The sudden attention is down to Facebook, now Meta, deciding that this is a technology that is ripe. They spent a lot of money buying Oculus, so they need to get something for their multibillion dollar outlay. So they’ve put an enormous amount of money drawing attention to it. That, however, doesn’t mean that it will succeed.

What kind of role do you feel companies think the Metaverse can play in the workplace going forward?

I think we have to start by stepping back and defining what we mean by the Metaverse.

Meta see it as a shared digital environment inside their Oculus headset. I want to take a different definition of Metaverse, closer to Neal Stephenson’s original definition and how it has evolved.

I live and work in the Metaverse, I just don’t live in virtual reality. I live in a world of digital access to information that swarms my life in rich ways, along multiple channels through multiple means of communication, whether it’s through my phone, my computer, or my TV bringing me 24/7 news.

That’s the important thing. When I think about the Metaverse, what I think about are the emerging capabilities that this new environment of multiple digital forms of interaction and engagement is creating. The pandemic changed everything in this regard, forcing us to work in (my definition of) the Metaverse. It also gave great impulse to innovation

Until two years ago, the idea of Zoom calls with your friends for cocktails on a Saturday evening, that just didn’t happen. But when we couldn’t meet in person for two years, we figured out ways to compensate. That innovation is going to become more profound in more contexts: in education, healthcare, retail, everywhere.

For me, that is the development of the Metaverse. That more and more of our engagements with information, services, and people will take place in an increasingly rich digital environment of multiple channels and multiple devices almost everywhere we go.

Do you think working and collaborating in the metaverse would improve or worsen productivity?

It’s still uncertain, but I think initially it would improve, as I’m not commuting to and from the office and hanging around there. But we know that informal interactions matter a lot, and the digital environment that we have been living in does not yet enable easy informal interactions. Now, that’s one of the places where I expect a fair amount of innovation.

Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. In the 1970s at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) they did a very interesting experiment with their remote offices in Oregon. To enable easy interaction but with people who were remote, they set up digital screens in a lounge and hallway in both offices and someone in Palo Alto could say, “Oh. Hey, Bill. I got to get you a message” to someone in Oregon. It was designed to enable the kind of engagement that only happens in that casual hallway connection or sitting having a cup of coffee.

The problem at the time was that technology was ridiculously expensive; they didn’t have cheap video connections. If you wanted to do that today, it could be done in 10 minutes.

I’m not saying that is what will happen, but what I am saying is that it is an example of what we’re about to see. A wave of innovation of all the tools that enable multiple forms of digital engagement interaction, some of which is casual, some of which is formal, across many dimensions of human activity.

Could the metaverse help solve the social problems thrown up by hybrid working, such as feeling disconnected from colleagues and the workspace?

Not yet. That’s why, at Salesforce, we’ve recently opened what we call the Salesforce Ranch, which is a physical facility to bring our workers together, often with families, to spend time socially. You have to do some work related things as well, but you can also hang out with colleagues. The idea being that they take back those emotional connections which they can then bring to the digital environment.

It’s just an experiment; whether it works, we don’t know. But companies like IBM, GE and Accenture all had facilities like this because they had globally scattered workers, and they would bring them together precisely around this idea. But they didn’t have a digital alternative, it was just to help people get to know each other. So this is not a brand new problem, and we’re taking a fairly conventional approach to beginning to solve it. We don’t know yet how it’s going to work, but that is a concrete step toward making that happen.

Bill Gates predicted at the end of last year that most virtual meetings in two to three years’ time will take place in the metaverse, do you agree?

No, I don’t, though Bill has an uncanny record of being right eventually. Take his view of the internet when it first started. It took a couple of years. So I think he wants to be not seen as behind the curve.

This is the hot topic of the moment. I think eventually the computational power will be great enough, the headset quality is great enough, and we’ll have solved the problem of nausea.

There is one place where this is working without nausea that is very different. My friend Walter Parkes, who was the producer for movies I worked on like Minority Report, created Dreamscape, which is location-based virtual reality, where you go inside a large cube with a group of friends. The idea was you come out of a film, and you can enter this box and find yourself in the environment you’ve just seen on film. The key thing is your VR arms, legs and hands are actually representations of your real arms, legs, and hands. So you’re getting some physical cues from your digital body that are similar to your physical cues of your actual body.

The theory of that is that it deals with the nausea problem. I’ve tried both and I think it’s true.

Salesforce’s advert during this year’s Super Bowl took aim at Meta and others who are looking to the Metaverse and elsewhere. As such, is what you see as the Metaverse not in Salesforce’s immediate future?

Immediate future, no. But that’s not to say we won’t experiment. We have actually tried sales meetings to get customers and our sales people together in a Metaverse environment.

One that we did with a private contractor was similar to Meta’s idea. It was clever, fun, and everybody thought it was interesting, but were they anxious to do it a second or third time? No. I can imagine that there will be ways in which we come to use the technology in specific contexts.

A concrete example of this at Salesforce is when our staff do shared coding. We write very complex software, and collaboration is very important. You make a mistake somewhere, and the error correction is just awful. So having people effectively communicate very complex data is a real challenge, and most of it is accomplished face-to-face. But we have coders now all over the planet, so a virtual environment might be a good place for having some collaborative work sessions between these teams working remotely. Narrowly defined, precisely shaped collaboration, where you have a shared workspace and can see code being written and aligned and so on. Where there is real advantage to being in a shared digital environment.