Bill Gates thinks office meetings will move to the metaverse for good, and within the next three years. As per a report by Fortune, the billionaire and founder of Microsoft made the prediction in his annual ‘Year in Review’, a collection where he makes guesses about the events of the impending year. “Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars," the report quoted Gates. Gates believes that virtual avatars will meet in a metaverse office space in the near future. The technology for the same would be made possible through motion capture and spatial audio. In fact, Microsoft in November announced the launch of Mesh which aims at a similar goal of a 3D office space.
With Mesh, people would be able to hold meetings in said 3D space using their customisable virtual avatars. Gates also predicted that our digital activity, heightened by the pandemic, will only continue to rise in the coming years. The pace of innovation and the quality of our digital activity should also improve, according to him. The biggest improvement will be with the use of spatial audio, Gates wrote. With it, audio would sound like it’s actually coming from the direction of the person speaking. According to him, one doesn’t realise how ‘unusual’ it is to have meeting audio come only from computer speakers.
It is about to be 2022 and we have made startling technological strides this year, after all. The metaverse has existed for ages and so have NFTs and Cryptocurrency, but 2021 was the year that they became truly mainstream. For the metaverse, this was not least due to Mark Zuckerberg’s intervention and the launch of Facebook’s (now Meta) metaverse. In a statement during announcement of Facebook’s rebranding, Zuckerberg wrote, “We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too". The founder’s letter goes in depth into the functioning of the metaverse where, he says, everything imaginable can be done. “In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up," it states.
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