Meta's new groove

The theme was a very clear and simple?“Enterprise, Enterprise, Enterprise” at this year's Meta Connect.?

VR isn’t an obscure hobby anymore, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the social media giant is setting its sights firmly on the 200 million people who buy PCs for work. With their virtual spaces platform Horizon Workrooms, a new Mixed Reality Headset targeted at businesses and bolstered by new partnerships with 微软 and 埃森哲 , Meta is making its intentions clear to shareholders that the metaverse is the future regardless of consumer or industry.

After investing “billions of dollars” in their vision, the rebranded Meta came back this year with more vision, products and some revenue numbers. Quest Store, to date, has made $1.5bn on sales of games and apps. However, financials aside, it's clear the “metaverse” economy is growing, and Meta is building partnerships and investing in research and development to make it a reality.

Passthrough and Pancakes

To put things into perspective, Glasses that enable True-AR is hard - really, really hard. We need to fit radios, speakers, holographic projectors, custom chipsets, batteries, cameras and sensors to map the world around you into glasses 5mm thick. So while everyone holds their breath for these elusive specs, Meta is loading their next set of hardware with much more refined passthrough capabilities and significantly better lenses. This enables a full transition from VR to AR and the special blend in-between.

“There’s an opportunity for a VR headset designed from the ground up to be great for work, as well as playing games and hanging out,” Zuckerberg said.?

Meta Quest Pro is just that. Aimed at Enterprise customers and packed with a whole host of features such as the curve cell battery, pancake lenses, eye tracking and inward cameras for facial tracking real-time avatar communication.?

Whilst wearing passthrough headsets outdoors for long periods of time is probably off the cards until the form factor improves, Meta gives us its vision of how transformational passthrough devices can be, from creating new immersive educational experiences to supporting training in healthcare and evolving the workplace virtually.

The Future of Work

With a big move towards shared spaces, there is a major play for businesses to leverage this with distributed workforces and the rise of hybrid and remote working. Businesses are looking to reconnect their workforce and offer new ways for people to interact in shared spaces.

The "virtualisation of workspace" offers businesses new ways to expand the workspace globally without boundaries and for teams to come together in a shared space. Of course, just like new office space, businesses will have to invest time in designing suitable virtual spaces for their workforce; however, with rents at an all-time high in major cities and many companies seeking innovative ways to meet eco targets, immersive technology presents the ideal solution for more sustainable business practices and the #futureofwork.

Meta demonstrated Logitech using ShapesXR to plan live events, PUMA Group and NewBalance designing shoes in Gravity Sketch and 诺华 using Nanome in their drug discovery workflow.

In the same way that digital twins have already demonstrated ways to shorten production times and reduce sampling waste, shared experiences also reduce the need for extensive travel. Major brands such as 阿迪达斯 , 大众 and 福特 have already adopted VR technology to make their processes more sustainable.

The Carrot and the Stick

Meta peppered their keynote with partnerships and name drops of businesses already within the “metaverse”. Most notable was the joint partnership announcement between Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Chair and CEO Satya Nadella. This partnership will bring Microsoft suite, Teams and Xbox cloud to Quest users this year.?

For businesses to engage with new technology, the utility and connections into their pre-existing ecosystems and workflows need to be there, so Meta's announcement of partnering up with one the biggest enterprise providers gives businesses a gateway to their new headset line.?

Production and design tool developers 欧特克 and Adobe are bringing their suite of professional tools and software, including Substance painter and CC’s creative tools; Epic Games will deliver access to Sketchfab to help populate the Metaverse and multi-year collaboration with NBCUniversal to bring a whole host of brands and experiences directly to Quest users.

Meta identity

Identity in the Metaverse is important; avatars that mimic your movements, gestures and expressions that truly represent you are critical to achieving social presence, especially for the future of the workspace. Meta showed off the next generation of avatars which uses Ai to recreate your image, including body movements and realistic representation.?

Apart from the obvious revenue stream opportunity for virtual clothing, avatars can become the new video off mode, keeping teams connected even if you don’t wish to share your full self. Meta is committed to making an interoperable avatar stack that enables you to take your avatar wherever you go within the Meta ecosystem and its partners.

What's next

While everyone is still getting over the fact that Meta Avatars will have legs, Chief Scientist Micheal Abrash gave us a glimpse into Meta’s R&D programmes, championing their brain-computer interface research using EMG (Electromyography).?

Meta’s prototype wearable wrist strap is a novel input approach that can read the signals on the motor neurons that run from the wrist to the hand. In a sense, it's a brain-computer interface.

Additionally, Abrash showed off their Neural Radiance Fields (NERFs) research, enabling you to scan and bring into virtual space real-world objects. Although VR and MR are current, Meta's future lies in AR with hints and drops of their research and commitment to their true AR glasses programme, “Project Nazare”.

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Hybrid and remote raise questions for the future of work. While many businesses are aware of the technology, the use cases are few and far between, and many buzzwords make this space tricky to navigate.?

However, with Meta’s major partnerships play and a brand new headset line which aims to reconnect workers, there certainly will be a lot more business owners and brands looking to bring workers into virtual 3D spaces to collaborate, communicate and feel physically present, as we enter this new era of augmented assistance in our world.