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Office meeting with avatars:
Facebook is already working on it
Photo: picture alliance / dpa / Facebook
Most people are likely to celebrate the turn of the year at home again: Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, most of the events were canceled in the previous year.
Instead, on New Year's Eve 20/21, concerts called "virtual" were shown on television and on the Internet, but these were only filmed live recordings.
The French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre, who played an entire concert as Avatar, did it differently.
While he was in his studio, the 75 million viewers on social networks experienced the performance as if it were taking place in the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral.
But this location was closed after the major fire in 2019.
Thanks to the multimedia simulation, the whole concert actually took place virtually.
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Scene from the music project "Welcome to the Other Side"
Photo: Sony Music
An event that could serve as a model for future work.
Since the first lockdown, the term New Work has been known to all those employees who can mainly do their work from home.
But instead of staring rigidly at a screen as before, the technological possibilities are now becoming more diverse.
Most of the tools under development are based on the idea of the metaverse.
The concept from the almost 30-year-old science fiction novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson has also motivated the tech giant Facebook to rename itself "Meta".
At the same time, Facebook proclaimed the Metaverse as the new "embodied Internet", which users should soon fill with life.
Office work or a visit to a museum with the Avatar?
So will we soon be able to visit concerts or museums as avatars on a regular basis?
Will it also be possible in the future to work, communicate and even manufacture products in this universal parallel world?
Even a separate currency is conceivable in this parallel world.
This is already being practiced in the blockchain-based virtual reality game "Decentraland", in which residents pay large sums of money for land or works of art with their own crypto currency Mana.
Real jobs for avatars have also been created here, these are also paid in mana.
Microsoft wants to combine "Teams" with the mixed reality function "Mesh"
For the day-to-day working world, however, Microsoft's plans seem to be the most relevant.
The frequently used New Work application Teams is to be combined with the mixed reality function Mesh in the future.
Participants in a teams conference will interact with one another in a completely virtual manner.
The avatars can even adopt the gestures, facial expressions and language of their real role models.
Hololens is the name of the device that makes it possible to immerse yourself in these new worlds, similar to virtual reality glasses.
The first mesh rooms could already be used in the coming year.
Employees who don't like to sit in long video conferences should close their eyes for a moment or get a drink from the kitchen - their avatar will continue to listen attentively to what the boss says.
Game developer Roblox has experience with avatars
The so-called gaming factor plays a special role in the development of these 3D worlds.
Because in computer games, users have long been familiar with navigating virtual worlds with avatars.
This is also the case with Roblox.
Here, the company's employees often hold their meetings directly on the gaming platform.
Sometimes with bizarre consequences, because at a meeting in real life a person can no longer behave as easily as an avatar.
A Roblox top manager recently reported in an interview that he always has to make sure that he is really in the virtual world before jumping angrily out of the window in a meeting.
On the other hand, Jean-Michel Jarre did not have to jump out of the window in his studio or virtually from his DJ booth at his New Year's Eve concert, because it turned out to be a complete success.
His unusual appearance as an avatar in an artificially created room gave him opportunities for expression that, according to him, could not have been implemented in real life.
A prospect that can also make people optimistic about virtual working life.
Because the workplace of the future will be much more dynamic than before.
New work has only just begun.