Reviewing the year 2021 in his blog, Bill Gates predicted that within the next two or three years meetings will completely move to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars that replicate real people. In 2022, the number of metaverse monthly active users reached 400 million.
Projected to become a $678.8 billion industry by 2030, the metaverse has become one of the hottest topics for discussion among investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers. Industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, Hyundai, and Gucci have already joined the metaverse to keep up with the global trend. But beyond the hype, what’s the practical use of this technology?
Powered by Web3 and accelerated by extended reality, the metaverse represents a universe of interconnected three-dimensional virtual worlds, where users can get realistic experiences to interact with each other using 3D avatars of themselves.
With teams collaborating remotely, spectators witnessing live concerts and fashion shows in 3D venues, and teens casually playing virtual games—the use cases for metaverse are becoming more and more diverse.
Exploring the opportunities the metaverse carries for businesses is exciting. Defining the applications that are useful here and now is the challenge we aim to address in this blog post. Continue reading to discover five meaningful metaverse use cases to consider in 2024.
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Discover the potential of the metaverse for your business
Empowering hybrid work through virtual collaboration
Remote and hybrid work models have made 60% of employees feel less connected to their coworkers than ever before. While Zoom-based team building events could have worked back in 2021, today people strive to get a sense of real presence whenever they approach online interactions.
With the metaverse, digital workplaces become virtual spaces providing highly immersive experiences that not just imitate on-premises collaboration but make it even more engaging with the help of graphically rich virtual environments, 3D avatars, and mixed reality getaways.
As an industry pioneer, Meta is actively exploring and implementing virtual collaboration opportunities. One of their products, Meta Horizon Workrooms, allows companies to bring their teams together in the metaverse by combining a set of dedicated virtual assets:
- A persistent whiteboard for making meeting notes and recording ideas in a virtual space
- Flexible rooms that allow customizing spaces for meetings and brainstorming
- A native remote desktop technology that allows bringing your physical computer screen into VR
- Spatial audio to guarantee full immersion into conversations
- Realistic avatars that transmit gestures and facial expressions to enhance the sense of presence
However, the potential of the metaverse for remote collaboration isn’t limited to organizing employees’ workplaces.
In B2B communities, the metaverse is a way to put companies ahead of the competition by developing a set of brand-compliant visual assets that make up personalized virtual spaces. These spaces represent an engaging way of demonstrating product features, pitching ideas to stakeholders, running workshops, and collaborating with other businesses in virtual environments.
Revolutionizing employee training
In their 2022 US Metaverse Survey, PwC asked business leaders about possible enterprise use cases of the metaverse. The results revealed that employee training and onboarding accounts for the highest share of replies, with 42% of respondents planning to provide experiences like this in the nearest future.
Metaverse-based employee training provides organizations with a number of competitive advantages:
- Effective learning in less time. Training in the metaverse occurs 4x faster than in conventional digital offices and classrooms.
- Better concentration. Learners that train in virtual classrooms have 4x better focus than those who choose eLearning.
- More confidence in the new skills. VR learners have almost 3x more confidence to apply the skills they acquired during the training.
Among the use cases of metaverse for employee training is one of Shell. A global energy giant applies a mix of industrial internet-of-things, robotics, digital realities, and artificial intelligence to help workers detect and prevent safety issues before they occur. Using mixed reality, operators learn and test the consequences of their decisions in simulated situations using VR headset voice guidance.
Metaverse is already used for the training of pilots and medical students. Although, its potential for developing employees’ tech skills is still underestimated. With digital acceleration being a priority for a vast majority of companies in 2023, leveraging metaverse-based tech skills training emerges as a way to timely approach it.
Guaranteeing real-time presence at virtual events
Another game-changing metaverse application that emerged mostly during COVID times and remained with us till now is metaverse events. A number of large-scale events including live concerts, fashion shows, and sports tournaments already take place in the metaverse.
This year, McDonald's launched a virtual event for the Lunar New Year. The company collaborated with a viral digital creator to develop creative designs and used a mix of 3D animation, AR, and AI technologies to build a state-of-art metaverse space for a Lunar New Year celebration of the future.
Events like this bring lots of excitement and provide their participants and spectators with total immersion in virtual experiences. But they are also a game-changer for businesses.
Moving conferences, product presentations, workshops, and business meetings to virtual spaces is also a great way to engage and entertain audiences, especially in times when distributed collaboration is deprived of human connection. In addition, such events have no space restrictions and the platforms where they take place are easily customizable and can be reused multiple times.
One of the Fortune 500 companies that are among our clients is piloting metaverse for virtual business events. Spaces developed by the Trinetix Visual Communication team help them host amazing online events, product demos, team meetings, and training sessions in the metaverse.
Discover more inspiring practices from our Visual Communication team
Making the most of crypto with virtual NFT experiences
The metaverse is built in blockchain, and it’s no wonder that decentralized finance was one of the first industries to adopt it. Making virtual experiences a part of financial services impacts consumers and businesses in a number of ways:
- Elevate banking offerings with 3D experiences, making it possible to display balances, pay bills, and transfers money through AR/VR platforms
- Provide asset managers with a personalized look at their portfolio and revenues as well as leverage virtual financial planning sessions
- Improve employee experiences with immersive capabilities for learning and training
But among all the metaverse use cases in banking and finance, NFT games and marketplaces appear to be the most successful. Such implementations engage users to interact with others in realistic environments, explore virtual spaces, and trade their NFT as a part of gameplay, using the play-to-earn model.
Decentraland, an Ethereum-based virtual world platform, is a popular game of this type. It boomed with the surge of NFT popularity and reached a $2.5 billion market valuation in 2022. Users of the platform share the same virtual world where they exchange collectibles, buy and sell items including digital real estate, socialize, and interact with each other.
Rethinking real estate experiences
Speaking of Decentraland and buying real estate properties there, we can’t omit another application of the metaverse, which is virtual real estate experiences.
In the metaverse, users can purchase historic buildings like the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower using NFTs. The digital twin technology allows developers and architects to fully replicate and build up any plot of land on the planet and make them available for sale.
Another case is homebuilders and real estate offices moving to the metaverse. In January 2023, KB Home, a US-based homebuilding company announced they were launching a virtual new-home community in Decentraland. Such a move will allow visitors to discover design choices to personalize their houses, including selecting flooring and lighting.
The metaverse holds opportunities for construction, interior design, and property showcases, including virtual real estate auctions. Thus, accurate modeling and visualization can allow people to walk through a 3D virtual rendition of buildings and interiors without leaving their homes.
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Metaverse development is about creating experiences that go beyond Zoom and Skype. No matter what the future holds, the metaverse seems to be making it multi-dimensional. Will manufacturing, healthcare, and finance move to the metaverse once? Who knows. But its potential looks promising and is definitely worth looking at.
At Trinetix, we offer metaverse 3D space development that helps you stand out. Join us in the metaverse to get inside our virtual office and look behind the scenes of our team’s life.
We design tailored virtual spaces and experiences to bring your ideas to the metaverse. You choose the journey—and our teams create visual assets to help make it real. If you’re up to exploring the metaverse potential, let’s chat about designing a more immersive future together!
