Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, a design software startup valued at $10 billion, said the metaverse is already here whether we like it or not.
"'Ready Player One' is not an instruction manual, it's a warning sign," Field said, citing the book and movie about a future virtual reality world. "Some of them will be technology that we have today. Some will be technologies tomorrow, but what's really important is that it's open, it's decentralized."
To prepare for the metaverse, Field said he's already an angel investor in Gather, a Sequoia-backed video chat startup that offers spatial audio to humanize virtual interactions. He's also seeing more people logging onto Fig Jam, Figma's digital whiteboard collaboration tool, to brainstorm with their teams or create virtual cities.
Field's comments came during a CEO roundtable on Tuesday evening, with other executives including Box's Aaron Levie and Airtable's Howie Liu. The three leaders shared thoughts on how the metaverse will shape the future of work.
Their consensus: the trend of people spending more time online will continue and will change work more quickly than we realize. And while true virtual and augmented reality applications in the workplace are still a few years away, we shouldn't underestimate how our work lives will be impacted.
"We're definitely underestimating the time horizon," Levie said. "Metaverse is another means by which information is going to be manipulated and shared and collaborated on."
Field agreed and cited the popularity of NFTs as one example. "People are recognizing digital goods and attributing value to them in a way that is even more so than physical goods," he said. "It seems to me that people do want to live more of their lives online. I think that's a pretty incontrovertible fact."
In that sense, Levie thinks the metaverse in the workplace will really be an extension of the collaboration software his and other companies have been building.
Collaboration tools that let employees transition between online and offline spheres will be useful for hybrid situations where companies want to recreate conferences or happy hours in a virtual setting, said Airtable's Liu.
Levie said Microsoft's metaverse demo at its Ignite conference last week raised questions about what kinds of virtual spaces are useful for workplace collaboration. Some elements were fascinating but others, like seeing how two people communicated via virtual avatars in a digital setting, seemed "wildly impractical," he added.
"It was a slower form of communication than if you had just been on video," Levie said. "And so will we trade off that latency of interaction and the fidelity of communication for maybe some other benefits of more people could be in a sort of a spatial environment or something? That's a sociology question more than a technology question."
In 5 to 10 years, once the technology has advanced, it could be more practical to work in those types of virtual environments, Liu said.
"I could imagine your workstation becoming your headset and you do immerse into that world," he said. "But I think that future is further away than probably the optimists project."
