Last week, team Delineate attended the Association of Survey Computing – Meet the Metaverse conference at the Oval in Kennington. We heard from some amazing speakers and we are proud to have sponsored the event! 

It was a day packed full of insights and learning, kicking off with Carl Hayden Smith covering the fact that the term metaverse really refers to extended reality, which is a broader umbrella term covering virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, and that we’ve probably been exposed to it more than we think we have.  

We then came to learn about how the metaverse has evolved over time. It turns out that it’s been around for longer than you might think – it was born in 2003 with the release of Second Life, a popular computer game in the virtual world, and today brands that are advertising through online games such as Fortnite are considered to be advertising in the metaverse – it turns out I have visited this mystical realm then, albeit whilst trying engage with my teenage son in the only language he currently understands! 

Later on in the day, Josh Drean dialled in from the US and spoke about how the metaverse is going to affect how we work in the future. He made it clear that organisations should begin to understand that the 9-to-5 corporate model of working at a desk isn’t going to be the norm, and that employment contracts may cease to exist! 

The younger generation has been bought up playing video games, and we’re now seeing people earning money from social media and YouTube and from playing video games, so will this be the same in the Metaverse? And what does this mean for businesses in the future?  

He spoke about the potential concerns of a younger generation not wanting to enter the corporate world, so will we expect employees to work from home, and enter the metaverse into a virtual office with the rest of the team? Will physical offices still exist? There are so many questions around the metaverse, and with it being in such an early stage, I wonder how and when this will essentially begin, and when and if we ever enter a fully immersive digital workplace. 

So, the more important question is how this will affect the survey and insights community? Parves Khan from Esomar helped us to understand the data and privacy laws that may come into play for individuals and organisations that will affect us, but regulation tends to follow trend which means that for now, we’re a little way from this in the research and insights industry.  

However, it is clear that there is a significant opportunity to engage better with our respondent audience, either through the metaverse or through interactive game-based research approaches that were so passionately described by Betty Adamou.  

One thing is for sure – nobody really knows what the future of the metaverse looks like, but we do know that it has the potential to change the way humans behave forever, which means that our way of researching them needs to change with it.