Discover key insights through this comparative analysis of Instructional Design models to help you select the best framework for your project.

Hands-on learning goes digital with 3D immersion:

At the Training Center of Excellence, we’ve created a realistic mock warehouse space that enables customer service associates to learn through hands-on application (on-premise) or immersive simulation (virtually) to understand the lifecycle of an order as well as the nuances of parcel packaging to better equip their ability to confidently consult solutions for our customers.

Learners on-site get to see, feel and touch product categories that experience high customer contact rates, while remote learners tour the 3D mock warehouse digitally and click into immersive learning videos and activities that zoom into the same product details.

The Embassy of Israel in Korea opened in the metaverse, becoming the first diplomatic mission in the country to gain a presence in the virtual world.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Korea and Israel, the Israeli Embassy opened a pavilion in the metaverse to offer information about Israel and promote exchanges between the two countries.

"The Israel-Korea Metaverse is a truly unique platform for sharing a virtual reality immersive experience, the history of Israel-Korea relations and also for carrying out all kinds of interesting interactions between Israelis and Koreans. Even though they are 8,000 kilometers apart, yet in the metaverse, they are right next to each other," Israeli ambassador to Korea Akiva Tor said during a launching event at a hotel in Seoul, Sept. 20.

Nobody knows everything about the metaverse, because it is still forming. Like supernovas beget galaxies, we are witnessing the cosmic beginnings of a digital evolution that will change our planet forever. Isn't it exciting to see how much we did and didn't know? The first step is knowing your audience and the platforms you'll most likely find them. All platforms will have similar steps—set up a partnership with the platform or go down the development route yourself. If you ever find yourself stuck somewhere in the vast reaches of the metaverse of things, we're here to help.

With this in mind, Linden Lab’s spokesperson mentioned that one key difference between Second Life and other metaverse platforms is its community’s focus on realism. “While there are 20 years of archived Second Life images scattered across the internet, you will see incredible quality our creators are delivering today — way beyond that of even newer virtual worlds or metaverses.”

This year’s metaverse category comes after five consecutive years of declining VMA views. As the metaverse continues to expand and attract younger audiences, MTV’s move to include virtual performance may help keep it up to date. 

The music industry is rife with Web3 integrations, as it has been on a trajectory of digital consumption for years after the introduction of music streaming services. Artists are releasing singles as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which are now eligible for recognition on international charts, while others are utilizing blockchain to improve music licensing.

Virtual event platforms provide remarkable spaces where remote workers can collaborate and communicate with their teams. With the help of tools like translation, livestreaming, CRM systems and others, virtual events can be effective team-building activities—and as a direct consequence, companies can use them to create inclusive and empathy-building exercises.

There are global examples too: One Stanford study explored how virtual reality can help make people more compassionate toward those experiencing homelessness. And the International Training Centre has been exploring VR’s use for training maritime labor ship inspectors.

Changes in work models, driven by the pandemic, have created a range of opportunities and challenges, and one of those is keeping employees engaged and motivated.

In 1990, Habitat’s founders concluded that the metaverse is defined more by the interactions among people within it than by the technology that creates it. They were particularly skeptical of virtual reality technologies, noting “the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced.”

At issue isn’t VR’s potential, but the Matrix-like idea that sensory immersion is necessary to the metaverse in every instance. The key distinction is between sensory immersion and social immersion. The idea that virtual environments require VR misunderstands “immersion.” It’s also ableist, since not everyone can see or hear. The metaverse’s history indicates that social immersion is the metaverse’s foundation.

Even before savvy developers began putting out apps for the metaverse, there was already a thriving social scene in it, one I’m told is often full of drama, intrigue, binge-drinking and ERP (erotic role play — in essence, VR sex).

VR regulars I spoke with described metaverse friend groups that were Gordian knots of romantic tension, with different people hooking up every day. There are also VR clubs, which are popular spaces for people to go drink and party. One woman described being at a DJ event at one such club and seeing avatars passed out on the VR floor, presumably because their human counterparts had overindulged at home.

Building metaverse platforms will transform the way we go about our routine online life, if not in the real world, in many means. Some changes possible in the immediate future that could become basic metaverse activities in the future could be:

1. Purchasing clothing and accessories for virtual avatars

2. Acquiring virtual property and building virtual buildings (homes, business complexes)

3. Taking part in virtual social events

4. Shopping in virtual malls through immersive commerce

5. Immersive learning through virtual classrooms.

6. Purchasing digital artwork, memorabilia, and assets in the form of NFTs

7. Interacting with digital humans for sales, customer support, and other commercial activities, as well as onboarding new staff for firms.

When you take a look at the actual examples to build these things, whether that is multi-user shared hallucinations in the ‘70s, Second Life and other metaverse-style experiences from the ‘90s, or Roblox and Fortnite from the 2000s, the tone is very different. It is not dystopic, it is creation, exploration, identification, and collaboration. Those are all very important.

At the end of the day, I don’t know that scarcity is that important, and this is actually where I think I disagree with many of my peers in the investing community, especially in relation to the blockchain. I don’t really get virtual land, certainly not scarce virtual land. The two brilliant things about the internet are network effects and zero marginal costs. Trying to create a next-version of the internet that constrains networks through money and introduces scarcity that need not be there, for a virtual plane of existence that does not actually need to simulate the real world, I don’t get and frankly don’t believe in.

The metaverse will thus render more acute many of the hard problems of digital existence today, such as data rights, data security, misinformation and radicalization, platform power, and user happiness. The philosophies, culture, and priorities of the companies that lead in the metaverse era, therefore, will help determine whether the future is better or worse than our current moment, rather than just more virtual or remunerative.

As the world’s largest corporations and most ambitious start-ups pursue the metaverse, it’s essential that we—users, developers, consumers, and voters—understand we still have agency over our future and the ability to reset the status quo, but only if we act now. Yes, the metaverse can seem daunting, if not outright scary, but this moment of change is our chance to bring people together, to transform industries that have resisted disruption, and to build a more equal global economy.

With job skills constantly shifting in line with technological and industry-specific developments, businesses and their employees are having to work harder than ever to keep up. The World Economic Forum predicts a 44% disruption of skills over the next five years, and organizations are increasingly turning to e-learning trends to reskill and upskill their teams.

 thriving underground nightlife scene is on the rise, but you don’t need to leave your house to be part of it. Launched in 2017, VR Chat is a completely free online social platform where users are offered an endless collection of virtual worlds. These online experiences mirror offline reality—and clubbing is no exception. In this global scene, DJs represented by avatars are pushing boundaries within the virtual electronic music world, and building venues that go beyond what could ever be achieved in real life. What is driving this burgeoning community? And how does it compare to clubbing in reality? We speak to the dedicated promoters, club founders and ravers shaping this nascent scene.

The most likely near-term innovation in displays, say the authors, is one that exploits a quirk of human biology. The eye is only capable of distinguishing 60 PPD in the central region of the retina know as the fovea, with significantly lower sensitivity on the periphery.

If eye movements can be accurately tracked, then you only need to render the highest definition in the particular section of the display that the user is looking at. While the required improvements in eye and head tracking add extra complexity to designs, the authors say this is probably the innovation that will happen soonest.

We are already seeing a trend of people meeting and interacting in online games and virtual worlds. Second Life has been around for nearly two decades and is still going strong, with over a million active users. With online games and communities dedicated to dating, we could begin to see people find love in the metaverse.

“Facebook seems to be operating from a sunk cost fallacy,” said Wagner James Au, an author and blogger who has covered the metaverse for more than a decade. “There’s no data to support VR headsets as being the mass market device.”  

In fact, flat versions of the metaverse are far more popular than 3D ones. About three-quarters of Roblox’s 52 million daily visitors are on a phone, while the vast majority of people using Microsoft Corp.’s Minecraft or Fortnite are on a desktop computer or mobile.

“The most important thing to do is to get down your high horse and maybe even talk in Discord...let them be angry, vent...engage with people because that`s what makes a difference,” said Brink.

Rosedale urged companies to create something of value saying that “searching for positive value is one area where the underlying platform doesn’t matter.”

Aaron Gani, CEO of BehaVR, a virtual reality mental health company, said the social aspects of the metaverse are intriguing: “What if it was you and the VR program and I connected you to a community of others who are going through similar things or have gone through similar things?”

The bigger problem may be outside the FDA’s jurisdiction.

Gani said that companies will be able to collect even more data about a person in the metaverse than they do currently. While the federal law known as HIPAA protects patient data, it doesn’t extend far beyond the doctor’s office. How companies do or don’t protect data that’s not covered will be something to watch, he said.

Like in the Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy, Inworld brings NPCs to life for gaming, metaverse, and business applications. While virtual worlds have become more immersive, realistic, and open, interactions with characters have remained relatively static, relying on scripted dialogue and behavior.

Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Inworld CEO, said, “In the last year, we’ve seen research that shows that online relationships can be as meaningful as those formed in real life. With Inworld, you can create gaming NPCs (non-playable characters), native populations for virtual worlds, virtual influencers, brand
representatives, in-world guides, and digital humans that can forge relationships with users and
unlock deeper engagement. This is the future of entertainment–stories that are told through
characters with a rich inner life, that audiences are invited to participate in, and take immersion
to the next level.”

Jonathan Kelly, an ISU professor of psychology and human computer interaction, says cybersickness can be temporarily debilitating — and a big turnoff toward using the technology.  “It commonly includes nausea, sweating, dizziness, headache and eyestrain,” Kelly says.

Earlier studies showed that more than half of first-time virtual reality headset users experienced cybersickness within ten minutes. The new ISU research is finding the more a person uses VR, the less woozy they become.

“Exposure to virtual reality seems to gradually reduce this experience of cybersickness,” Kelly says. “This is similar to other forms of motion sickness, car sickness, sea sickness, where for most people, if they experienced that sickness initially, it will eventually reduce over repeated exposures.”

These peoples have unique cultures and ways of relating to others and the environment. But history has left a legacy of structural inequality and disadvantage. Coupled with lack of access to technology and skills education opportunities, this means many are being left out of the conversation in the development of future technologies. If we want safe and equitable digital futures, it is imperative Indigenous peoples have a seat at the table in the development of these technologies.

And if today’s Indigenous schoolchildren are to thrive in the decades to come, it is essential that they learn how to use the digital tools that will drive the global economy in the 21st century. Importantly, after learning basic coding and computing skills, many of these youngsters now see a pathway to a range of careers in science, technology, engineering, and maths, providing them with a vital entry point into the digital economy.

At the same time, the oral traditions and cultures of our ancestors are at risk of being lost, so mobilizing the power of technology and putting it in the hands of young people is therefore a smart way to tackle both these needs.

For example, a potential flaw in Second Life, which caught users’ attention and drew people in, was the aimlessness that initially confused many users.

Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist who spent two years inside the virtual world and author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human said in a statement,

“It’s often not that going into a virtual world is sort of fulfilling a pre-existing need, a lot of people check these things out because they hear about them, but then discover something that they enjoy doing or a community they enjoy interacting with that they didn’t know about ahead of time.”
Speaking on the need for toolkits, Rosedale added the reason tens of millions of people tried Second Life was due to the ability to be creative and expressive in a “realistic, lifelike domain.”

Overall, “the metaverse is almost entirely hype and baloney right now,” said Philip Rosedale, whose company Linden Lab created the pioneering virtual civilization Second Life. “If you're worried about your company needing to jump in right this very minute to make your metaverse play, you can stop worrying.”

But that doesn’t mean it can be pushed aside. The metaverse “is something we all have to be thinking about, especially when it comes to the enterprise, because it does influence things that come next,” Webb said.