Two years of the pandemic have highlighted the pros and cons of long hours of remote work. Commuting time is definitely saved, and businesses save a lot of overhead, but in the long run, a sense of belonging, teamwork, collaboration, and ultimately motivation and productivity are all affected. Many companies now prefer a hybrid way of working, where employees follow a rota and alternate between working in the office and from home. With the metaverse, “hybrid” acquires a new meaning. While regular visits to new smaller workplaces may be required, many of the face-to-face interactions of office work can be replicated via the virtual office.
IT global technology giant Accenture, under the Metaverse Continuum Group, has created a virtual location called “Nth floor” where employees can interact and participate in immersive work and learning experiences. In April 2022, the company announced his 150,000 new hires. All of them will be working from the Metaverse with VR headsets from day one. To this end, 60,000 headsets have been deployed in the company’s offices across multiple countries. Metaverse Champion Paul Daugherty, Group Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, hosted several meetings on the Nth floor.
Such facilities are no longer just for Fortune 500 companies. For example, India-based company NextMeet allows digital avatars to move in real time between virtual offices, help desks and conference rooms, give live presentations, interact with colleagues in virtual lounges, and find seats in conference centers. We offer an immersive platform. The employee accesses the virtual environment via his desktop computer or his mobile device, curates an avatar, and uses keyboard buttons to navigate the virtual workspace. Virtual offices, digital avatars, and colleagues keep ideas and collaboration as effective and accessible as before, even in work-from-the-office scenarios. This improves interoperability and successfully solves many problems arising from his remote mode of work seen in his first two years of the pandemic.
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In this context, avatars, both physical employees and ‘digital colleagues’, play an important role.
The workplace of the future will likely include this second category of workers – various “digital co-workers”. These workers are highly realistic, AI-powered, human-like bots. They replace cumbersome chatbots and give employees and end customers much more for administrative inquiries, technical troubleshooting, real-time assistance with applications, new employee onboarding, and a variety of other tasks. Provide a great user experience. The underlying algorithms are able to understand text, listen to speech, converse in natural language, sense and interpret context, show emotion, make human-like gestures, and make decisions. increase. One example is UneeQ, his platform for technology focused on creating “digital humans.” Her Nola, created by the company, is his digital shopping assistant or concierge for his Noel Leeming store in New Zealand. Another of his New Zealand-based tech startups, SoulMachines, is a real and emotionally sensitive digital company that serves as skin care consultant, COVID health advisor, real estate agent, and educational coach for college applicants. created his human.
Learning, development and training are key areas that will be completely transformed by the Metaverse. Digital coaches help train employees and provide career advice.In the Metaverse, all objects (training manuals, machines, products, etc.) are interactive, with 3D displays and step-by-step “how-to” guides. Provided. Virtual reality role-play exercises and simulations will become commonplace, allowing a worker his avatar to learn in highly realistic ‘game-play’ scenarios’. VR technology is already being used in many fields to facilitate skill development.
Surgical technology company Medivis uses Microsoft’s HoloLens technology to train medical students through interaction with 3D anatomical models. Embodied Labs uses her 360-degree videos to help healthcare professionals experience and diagnose the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and age-related deafness. Bosch and Ford Motor Company have developed a VR training tool using the Oculus Quest headset to train technicians in electric vehicle maintenance. UK-based company Metaverse Learning has teamed up with the UK Skills Partnership to create a series of nine of his augmented reality training models for frontline nurses in the UK, identified using 3D animation and AR. scenarios to test learner skills and reinforce best practices. nursing. MGM Resorts worked with Strivr to give potential employees the chance to try her job in VR before accepting a job offer. If someone finds that the job isn’t for them, MGM saves them time and money by not having to recruit, onboard, or train them, and they simply leave them in short order.
Marketing is another important area for the Metaverse. Product manufacturers and service providers will be able to interact with their customer base in a more immersive and instinctive way than is currently possible via social media platforms. As technology advances and the user experience becomes more seamless, the role of digital humans will shift from concierge to advisor. This could take the form of new Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), armed with the knowledge of real-world advisors and the ability to process, analyze, and interpret large amounts of information at superhuman pace and accuracy. In a global, multicultural work environment, API-enabled services such as Google Translate may be embedded in digital coworkers that translate voice and text into multiple languages in real time as meetings progress. This reduces the potential for misunderstandings and “lost translations” that often occur in real-world multicultural discussions.
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Digital human technology can be deployed in multiple locations at once. Digital assistants can be deployed for more repetitive, tedious, or dangerous work in the metaverse. It is said that this will free human employees from much of the tedious and repetitive work and allow them to engage in more creative and value-added work. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, the large-scale deployment of digital humans will require increased automation and replacement of human jobs for lower-skilled workers who generally have less opportunity to transition to other roles. There are also certain risks involved. It can also erode cultural and behavioral norms.
For example, if humans become more disinhibited in their interactions with digital humans, that behavior can permeate their interactions and relationships with other people in the real world.
work 3.0
Abik Chanda & Siddhartha Banjopadhyay
penguin random house
512 pesos, 799 rupees
Excerpt from Work 3.0 by Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, with permission from Penguin Random House
