Any venture into the enterprise metaverse should strike a balance between enabling immersive social interactions in a virtual environment and never losing sight of the value of traditional real-world person-to-person interactions.
In your journey to the enterprise metaverse, where do you start? Here’s a quick guide:
1. Hold a virtual event. DXC recommends that companies interested in exploring the metaverse start by hosting a virtual event to get the full experience at scale. You may want to begin, as we did, with running an internal virtual event to get a feel for what it is all about and to gauge the business value of spontaneous interactions. Since a virtual setting is limitless, it’s easy to do things like adding overflow space for presentation attendees if needed — the ultimate agility for event planning.
Just because your event will be virtual doesn’t mean that it can be spun up in just a couple of weeks, though. When holding a virtual event, count on spending a couple of months on planning, preparation, support and onboarding. Develop an event playbook with tips and tricks on the options to fulfill certain requirements — for instance, what space in your virtual world can easily accommodate more than 100 people — and capture it for reuse at future events.
Also, establish a support staff to deal with potential technical issues, and assign a small team of virtual greeters to welcome attendees and help them adapt to virtual as they arrive.
2. Focus on the user experience. Personalise the environment for your audience and provide thematic experiences that are rich and rewarding. Virtual worlds give designers the chance to design a customised space. Even though just about anything can be designed into a virtual world, ease of use must be a primary goal. There must also be a focus on maintaining stability and safety.
3. Leverage gamification. The metaverse can come to life with activities, competitions and reward systems through gamification of the workplace. For example, at DXC, we are using the metaverse for team-building activities that include playing fun games. Visualise in three dimensions and be creative — one idea is to build a roller coaster in your virtual world that employees can ride to attend a meeting. Or hold your event on a beach as we have and offer boat rides to attendees.
4. Hire people with the right skills. Whether you’re holding an event or exploring workplace opportunities, find professionals with experience in building and maintaining immersive experiences. Creating exciting and compelling virtual worlds requires the talents of 3D artists, UX designers and game engine developers who have experience in areas such as the Unity game development platform.
When creating virtual worlds, it is important to work with a device- and platform-agnostic provider that can deliver services across all platforms in the metaverse. An enterprise metaverse strategy can be integrated with workplace initiatives if your provider has the essential skills for building virtual worlds and the 3D assets in them.
For more information on developing a virtual world presence for your enterprise and the benefits of doing so, read our paper Moving into the metaverse and our blog How to host a large event in the metaverse.
About the Authors
About the author
Nathalie Vancluysen is head of XR and Distinguished Technologist at DXC Technology. She leads the global extended reality (XR) business in DXC that includes immersive technologies such as AR, VR and MR. She is responsible for building the strategy and portfolio while working together with key partners and customers.
Chris Cornelius is the global offering manager for Immersive Collaboration at DXC Technology. He is responsible for working together with key clients and metaverse partners to steer the offering strategy and roadmap.