The Future of Community

Chapter 10The Future of Work

Part 1: The Metaverse

The metaverse was all the rage for much of 2021. As Mugatu from the movie Zoolander would say, “It's that damn metaverse! It's so hot right now!” It was so hot that Facebook even changed their name to Meta. The grand vision of the metaverse is that it was going to change the way we all lived, worked, and interacted with one another. Much like Web3, there are a variety of definitions of what the metaverse is and what it will become. To validate and debunk some of those myths, we're going to break this chapter into two parts. First, we'll take a deep dive into the metaverse: what went well, what went wrong, and where we go from here. In the second part—penned by guest author Denes Robert Fantasny—we'll explore a less discussed application of the metaverse: the industrial metaverse, and how companies can leverage this technology for their engineering, manufacturing, and field operations.

Let's first dive into the metaverse and debunk some common misconceptions.

What the Metaverse Is Not

The metaverse is not augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR), although these are important interfaces to help users experience the metaverse, and point to some of its potentially more exciting experiences (for instance, we are very excited by the possibility of travel in the metaverse, especially to visit places we can't physically go, including space). AR and VR join technologies such as smartphones and laptops as just one of the many interfaces ...