The future of the metaverse remains undecided.

On one hand, there is a lot of enthusiasm for it. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 25% of people will spend an hour or more in the metaverse each day. And McKinsey & Company argues that “with its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore.”

On the other hand, funding for augmented and virtual reality is currently decreasing due to a lack of mass adoption.

There are many definitions of the metaverse out there, but most descriptions agree that the metaverse is a collection of persistent, shared, and interoperable digital spaces that enable virtual human interaction with an immersive user experience, such as with extended reality technologies.

Beyond that, several enabling technologies are part of the metaverse concept and are sometimes also placed under the umbrella of Web3, including digital identity, nonfungible token (NFT), cryptocurrency, and decentralized autonomous organization.

More important is how these digital spaces will be used to run businesses more efficiently. Can the metaverse – a concept with roots in the gaming sector and commonly perceived as the future of social media or entertainment – play an important role in the digital transformation of businesses and even unveil new business opportunities?

How the metaverse affects human interaction

The metaverse could influence the way employees, consumers, and citizens interact with each other and with organizations. For example, metaverse technologies have the potential to support employees in their remote collaboration and interaction.

But hold on a moment. Aren’t we a bit fatigued from remote working after COVID-19 lockdowns? Don’t some of us have a strong desire to meet people in person again?

Sure, but in a globalized economy, we still need human interactions without physical presence. The pandemic has simply accelerated a pre-existing digital transformation of work, helping remote and hybrid work to become widely adopted sooner.

Yet true-to-life remote interaction still has a lot of room for improvement. This is where the strengths of the metaverse concept, such as immersivity, 3D user experiences, and ultra-realistic avatars, play an important role.

Think, too, of how data is currently shared. What if business data could be experienced and shared within a 3D digital space, in an integrated fashion, without cumbersome desktop sharing of 2D screens?

What we see today, and what could be a first step toward a metaverse, are specific use cases of dedicated apps that provide immersive access to business data, be it for joint exploration or individual analysis. For example, a salesperson could use augmented 3D models of real-world assets, enhanced with actual ERP data (such as supply time), to demo products in a much more visual way. A virtual showroom with remote support from experts could make the sales situation even more appealing.

Moving forward, we expect to see more use cases and an increasing level of immersivity and interactivity. There will be an evolution from dedicated apps for specific use cases to an entirely interconnected metaverse consisting of integrated, interoperable spaces, where people can carry on their digital identity and context from one space to another and seamlessly transition between physical and digital worlds at any time.

But to avoid the feel of a dehumanizing dystopia, the degree of involvement in the digital space should be an individual choice: each of us, depending on the task, the circumstances, and our own emotional state, should be able to choose the right amount of immersivity and interactivity of our own personalized digital workplace.

How the metaverse affects businesses

But what could the metaverse concept mean for value chains, business models, and processes?

A good starting point is to look at the sectors where we currently can see most metaverse activities (see figure below).

Some examples that could affect future business models and processes include the following:

• Gaming, entertainment, and social media are already established use cases, with people participating in massively multi-player online games like Fortnite, virtual concerts of pop bands like ABBA, or virtual meet-and-greets with Vocaloids. Roblox, an online game platform and game creation system, is the biggest virtual world with 230 million monthly users.
• The industrial metaverse is about to revolutionize the design and prototyping process by creating virtual collaboration spaces for engineers to design new products based on digital twins. Factory lines could be planned, simulated, and optimized by visualizing digital twins of complete plants. But even larger transportation networks could be visualized within a metaverse by using digital twins of entire cities.
• Customer experience, online commerce, retail, and marketing are areas where most business use cases and prototypes can be observed today. This includes virtual showrooms, virtual shopping experiences with virtual fitting rooms for fashion, NFT-based loyalty programs, omnichannel advertising, and new digital brand experiences.
• Today’s digital transformation efforts often seek to automate core business processes as far as possible, with human activities reduced to a minimum, but there are (and will be) business activities that require human interaction, switching between digital platforms and in-person communication. A metaverse will better facilitate digital human interaction by making it more efficient, such as with a virtual boardroom, where executives can meet to review the latest business figures and evaluate new market opportunities. Other employee roles could also benefit from virtual offices (such as Microsoft Mesh), as these might allow them to access business data in an immersive way.
• Enterprise education is another good fit, as companies develop new training programs for cases like employee onboarding and safety training.
• Businesses will also be created within and for a metaverse, like trading platforms for all kinds of digital goods and artifacts. Those goods can be used by people when interacting in digital spaces, as with digital avatars. Platforms can also be created for purchasing virtual pieces of land or apps for creating personal avatars.

The whole value chain of enterprises might become hybrid, just like the model of work becomes increasingly hybrid. Besides the traditional value chain we know from the physical world, we can expect a virtual value chain that spans any sort of virtual asset, such as currency and goods. But inbound and outbound mechanisms between the virtual and physical worlds will need to be in place to ensure transfers are actually possible.

For example, physical assets need to be transferable into the virtual world. One prominent way of doing this is the digital twin. And virtual assets like NFTs should be transferable (sellable) into a fiat currency (dollar, euro). We expect that business information systems will need to evolve to enable these hybrid value chains.

How the metaverse affects business networks

Business networks are about intercompany collaboration and rely on automated data exchange and human interaction. How can a metaverse help them?

• Virtual business networks could transform the way enterprises interact with their supply chain members. Complex supply chains and operations could be visualized in joint virtual spaces. Digital innovation spaces for collaborative virtual workshops could be used to jointly identify bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization.
• Platform businesses (think Airbnb and Amazon) will engage with and facilitate interactions between their providers and consumers in virtual, interactive spaces in increasingly sophisticated ways.
• Consortiums of complex projects could use virtual spaces for coordination purposes. Sustainability initiatives across companies could also be orchestrated in virtual, shared spaces where environmental data are effectively represented.

How the metaverse affects sustainability

Many enterprises seek to reduce physical travel of employees not only for time and cost savings but also for achieving sustainability goals. The metaverse can help achieve those goals.

Of course the carbon footprint associated with the use of computing power needs to be taken into account, but research indicates that the comparative environmental impact of physical travel is much greater. Enterprises that restrict physical travel to business occasions that really make sense and fulfill other meeting needs with metaverse encounters can significantly reduce emissions.

We also think the metaverse has the potential to make the UN Sustainable Development Goals much more visual, tangible, interactive, and engaging. Imagine a universally accessible digital twin of the whole planet Earth: companies would be able to simulate and see the effect of joint sustainability initiatives and engage citizens with the results. The potential effect of such a shared, interactive, vivid view to accelerate the green transition and address climate change would be enormous.

Where to play

Looking at the variety of potential use cases for business value chains and models, the next question is how to identify scenarios in which the metaverse might make a difference and could improve the way people interact when running their business. What criteria qualify use cases for the application of metaverse technologies?

At SAP, we have developed a unique method for identifying high-value scenarios and exploring high-impact metaverse cases. In customer workshops, we guide participants through metaverse search fields and business patterns relevant to their value chain and business model with questions like:

• Which people related to your business could engage in a shared digital space?
• What are the typical interactions these people could have within that digital space?
• What are the objects (digital twins) these people need?

The exploration process is animated by use case search fields and inspirational metaverse cards with practical examples and additional ideas to consider. Participants explore their organization’s value chain, identify focus areas, and generate unique metaverse use case ideas.

Defining success in the metaverse

Like any new technology, the metaverse must overcome the hype. To reach the plateau of productivity, both technology and use cases must further evolve and mature.

The convenient access to the metaverse through hardware devices is key for broad user adoption. This could be classic 2D screens (like gamers use), head-mounted devices (glasses), or a completely new kind of device.

Although we do not yet have the perfect breakthrough device, hardware will get smarter and support immersive user experiences beyond what we know from today’s augmented reality and virtual reality devices. This could be a game changer for the whole sector, similar to the invention of touch screens for mobile computing.

There are also still some limitations to the infrastructure required to support a metaverse (computational power, network bandwidth, and latency). This is at least true when we talk about lots of people sharing the same digital space at the same time or about very large 3D assets, such as digital representations of huge buildings (like railway stations), including construction details. We can expect that 5G and 6G technologies will address the connectivity requirements for a fully developed metaverse.

Standards need to cover interoperability and other topics like interactive 3D assets and photorealistic rendering, avatars, identity management, and financial transactions.

Building a pervasive, open, and inclusive metaverse at a global scale will require cooperation and coordination between a constellation of international standards organizations, including the Khronos Group, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Open Geospatial Consortium, Open AR Cloud, Spatial Web Foundation, and others.

Because the metaverse concept and technologies are in their early stages, metaverse scenarios are currently dominated by technical considerations. We’re asking questions like what’s possible today? What will be possible in the future? And what kind of photorealistic avatars can we use? We expect that, over time, using metaverse technologies will become as natural as building mobile apps today.

As the concept becomes more defined and the technology more settled, we’ll turn to questions related to the metaverse’s business value, and methodologies and approaches will be needed.

The metaverse has the potential to go beyond gaming, entertainment, and social media. It could have a deep impact on existing and new business models and processes. How this will precisely unfold is still unclear, yet one thing is for sure: the journey will require an intensive exchange of ideas, knowledge, and perspectives within the technology sector, among businesses, across industries, and throughout society at large.

Snapshots

The Intelligent Enterprise Institute team visits the SAP Scalpel Office in London to ask people in and around the office about the metaverse. We were also able to give the participants a small experience of a VR experience. Hear their thoughts on their experience, how businesses can leverage the metaverse, and whether they would trust an avatar to be the CEO of their company!

Dedicated apps for specific use cases can be considered the first steps toward the metaverse. The BEUMER Group’s augmented reality app allows its service technicians to carry out a visual inspection reliably and without paper. Learn more from this UX Design Award submission video here.

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