Once a week, my husband goes fishing on a beautiful lake in South Korea with his young nephew with whom we shares a passion for the sport.
My husband fishes from our sofa in central London and my nephew from Corrèze, in the deepest, darkest French countryside.
Equipped each with Oculus headsets, they access a shared and personalised space where they visit a virtual shop to buy their bait and sit happily side by side shooting the breeze over their catch and other, unimportant issues. And they say women talk!
By extension what would you say if I invited you to a virtual meeting which you could join from anywhere in the world where you could interact freely one to one or with the full group, stand up, walk around, share slides from your laptop and generally do the things we do when we meet in person?
Could this be the best of all worlds where we get to interact in almost all the ways we can in IRL (In real life) environments whilst being able to put a wash on and pick up the kids after the call? I’m not suggesting that we are there yet? The professional metaverse tech we have tested so far at Positive Momentum remains either
- challenging – requires a Master’s in computer science to be able to log in
- impractical- I challenge you to drink coffee whilst wearing an Oculus mask, or
- downright alarming -no-one wants to attend a meeting where you can only see the floating heads of your colleagues!
And yet solutions are in train to resolve all of these challenges which range from Metaverse computer screens which would make headsets redundant to ever improving avatar creations, think Abba Voyage for the tech which captures you as you really are but with enhancements where you want them (bring that on I say!).
Whilst the techies get on with that, I am having a field day exploring the metaverse and working out how it will work for me. What do I want to take from it and what I want to leave is a fascinating and mind stretching journey. That’s when I can get my husband to leave his South Korea lake for long enough to hand me the mask of course!
