THE FUTURE OF WORK
Good morning and welcome to your workday. Congratulations on hitting your VR headset workout target this morning. Please log into your workplace avatar, the 3D representation of you that mirrors your movements, expressions and gestures. Reminder: you have a client presentation in the metaverse – would you like to browse through the work looks you’ve purchased from digital boutique DressX? How about a suit from rising Swedish designer Placebo Digital Fashion House or signal your real-world love of prints with this DressX Kandinsky shirt? Your meeting is at the client’s customised office space, with the Andrés Reisinger chairs from his recent digital furniture NFT auction. Please wait for all avatars to fill the room before you begin the fully immersive slide show in 3D. No, nobody will tell you are standing in your living room, hair wet and wearing the same activewear as yesterday.
Speculative work scenarios such as this have been hard to avoid. Meta (formerly Facebook) recently announced its ‘VR for business’, Horizon Workrooms; Microsoft, too, has a version called Mesh for Teams and open-world ‘metaverse’ platforms, such as Decentraland, Somnium Space and Sandbox have
