Would you go to work wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset? Cut off from your surroundings but immersed in a world made of pixelated graphics, in which you see your colleagues as avatars?

It sounds like fun, until it isn’t.

Earlier this year, 18 volunteers at Coburg University in Germany agreed to work in a virtual reality environment for a week. It was widely reported that two of them dropped out within hours, complaining of nausea, anxiety and migraines. The rest held out, but experienced on average a 42% increase in frustration levels and 48% in eye strain.

Almost a fifth suffered a drop in wellbeing.

There was one less widely reported outcome of the study that puts the world of virtual work in true perspective: a week after the experiment, two participants said they were ‘amazed by how detailed the real world is’ after removing the headsets.

And there is the true challenge of the metaverse as a business model, or as a working environment. The real world is so much more detailed, defined and immersive. Interacting with others typically involves interacting on numerous levels, including body language, vocal tone and visual cues like smiles and frowns. In the metaverse, graphics tend to be one-dimensional, as much as they claim to provide a fully 3D experience.

The Facebook metaverse gamble

This helps explain why the strategy embraced by Mark Zuckerberg to turn Facebook into a metaverse business, even down to the name of the company being changed to Meta, has been such a spectacular failure. For now, that is. (It did, to be fair, turn ‘metaverse’ into a buzzword.)

In October 2021, when the new name and strategy were announced, Facebook had a market capitalisation of around $900 billion. The virtual sky was the limit. And with a budget of $10 billion, Meta’s new Reality Labs VR division was the launchpad.

Four months later, in February 2022, when the company reported its first ‘post-Meta’ financial results to reveal a lacklustre business, its market capitalisation plunged by $232 billion – an all-time record for any listed company in the US. The pain hadn’t ended. Its Q3 results announced in October, with revenue down 52% on the year before, prompted another fall in share price by about a fifth. By end November this year, Meta’s total market cap was down to just over $560 billion.

This is an eye-watering amount to lose. And yet some expert commentators say this might be a small price to pay for freeing Facebook (okay, Meta) from Apple and Google. They control all access to the internet and set the parameters within which everyone, including social platforms, have to operate. If Zuckerberg does succeed at integrating our virtual and real lives seamlessly and effortlessly, he will have a huge advantage over others in this space – and this will give him and Meta a far greater say in the future of the internet.

What does the metaverse offer at the moment – and to Africa, in particular?

Of course, Meta is not the sum total of the metaverse. Its virtual world is an also-ran in the world of virtual property. Decentraland dominates, and has attracted brands ranging from financial services giant JP Morgan to beer brand Miller Lite, which opened a Meta Lite Bar for virtual drinkers.

Africa has its own metaverse: Africarare’s Ubuntuland. It has sold space to Nedbank, MTN and ad agency M&C Saatchi Abel, and struck a deal with Primedia Outdoor to sell virtual billboards.

Clearly, businesses can set up shop in the metaverse. But equally clearly, it is not about to replace business as usual. It can be seen as a spin-off of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), which encompasses emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing. But 4IR was hyped beyond its potential to deliver jobs and economic growth to Africa. It turns out that it is in reality a disparate range of technologies that depend on specific-use cases rather than a silver bullet for all.

In the same way, the metaverse is made up of a range of disparate interfaces to information, communication, commerce and collaboration rather than a single unified platform for business.

More significantly, the metaverse is expensive. Access via VR headsets is limited to the elite who can afford it. Access via browsers on computers and smartphones is data-intensive. This, in turn, means it is unaffordable to those who cannot afford large data bundles.

The metaverse as a bridge across the digital divide in education and society across Africa? Not in our reality.

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