Overview
With the advent of the metaverse, an online virtual reality space that serves to bring people together in virtual environments, there has been growing curiosity and debate surrounding its potential impact.
One specific use touted by Metaverse parent company, Meta (formerly Facebook), is to serve as a place where coworkers can meet in a more immersive environment than video conferences like Zoom. However, research has yet to explore how people feel about attending such virtual reality meetings.
On the one hand, meeting in a virtual reality space may seem appealing to some, especially those with an eye toward tech trends or those just fed up with Zoom. On the other hand, the need to don a headset and haptic gloves just to observe a PowerPoint may feel like even more work than Zoom.
Although the actual metaverse may not be fully ready yet for mainstream meeting use, we designed a simple survey experiment to gauge people's enthusiasm toward virtual reality work meetings relative to traditional video conferences on platforms like Zoom.
The Experiment
We enlisted 400 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk and presented them with a hypothetical scenario in which their work team was scheduling an online meeting. Each participant was randomly assigned to either a scenario involving a Zoom meeting or a scenario involving a metaverse meeting, then asked how much they were looking forward to the meeting.
Participants were given the following instructions for the scenario [randomized conditions in brackets] with the corresponding image below.
"Imagine your work team is scheduling an online meeting with you and 3-4 other co-workers. The meeting will be held via [Zoom (video conference) using your laptop / the metaverse (virtual reality) using a VR headset and haptic gloves]."
After viewing their discreetly assigned image and scenario, participants were asked “How much are you looking forward to this meeting? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much),” using a 1-7 survey scale. A later survey collected a series of demographic details to test whether the results differ based on age or gender.
Results
The analysis revealed a significant difference in participants' excitement for the meeting based on the platform. Participants reported higher levels of anticipation for meetings in the metaverse (avg. = 4.62) relative to Zoom (avg. = 4.01), a 15.2% increase (p = 0.002). This effect remained consistent across gender and age groups.
Conclusion
Our experiment suggests that people are more excited about attending work meetings in the metaverse than through traditional video conferencing platforms like Zoom. While the metaverse is still in its early stages and not yet widely accessible, the prospect of holding meetings in a virtual reality space seems to generate genuine anticipation among participants.
Of course, people’s reactions to metaverse meetings may change once they actually experience them—for better or worse. As technology continues to evolve and virtual reality becomes more prevalent (assuming, of course, that it does), it will be fascinating to investigate how people's perceptions, decisions, and behaviors continue to evolve within the digital landscape.
Methods Note
We used an independent samples t-test to test for significant differences in perceptions between our two experimental conditions (Zoom vs. the Metaverse). Additionally, we employed OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to test for possible interaction effects between the main results and participants’ age and gender. Statistical significance was determined based on p-values of less than 0.05. Data and survey materials for this experiment are available upon request.