MIAMI – The changes to work life since the COVID-19 pandemic have made a lot of things easier, from commute time, meetings, phone calls and even training.
But what if the next step in the evolution of work involved employees jumping into the metaverse?
Founders of a South Florida company think you could be walking into work in a digital environment in the future.
Mytaverse, a Miami-based company, takes businesses virtual, or creates a virtual extension of companies’ operations.
“We want people to be able to use it in their day-to-day and say, ‘Let’s go into a conference room and have a meeting,’” founder Kenneth Landau said. “If you’re not in the same space, if you’re around the world, you can do it here.”
The company’s using its platform to transform how businesses interact with customers and how employees interact with each other.
Landau founded the company with Jaime Lopez in 2020.
“It is named this way because we are looking for ways to create your own metaverse for enterprise companies to build,” Landau said. “We help them create their own metaverse, so they can call it ‘my metaverse.’ Therefore, ‘Mytaverse.’”
Landau said two things are constant.
“The first one is, (companies are) not very sure what the metaverse is and will be,” he said. “The second one is, they know they had to get into it and we bridge that gap.”
What makes Mytaverse unique when compared to other examples of the metaverse is its use of gaming technology to create a more realistic environment.
it’s also a cloud-based enterprise, in which the company partnered with Amazon Web Services to power it, meaning all you need is an internet connection and your browser to go into it—no headset or similar gear required.
All you have to do is create the account, customize an avatar and then you’re teleported into the digital world.
“It is intentional, because now we’re empowering any person anywhere in the world to enter a metaverse that looks and feels like their own company, their own assets inside that metaverse, but you’re using gaming technology to make it easy to enter,” Landau said.
Whether it’s conference rooms, training simulations, or conventions, the platform allows companies to build their metaverse from scratch, either by using some standard Mytaverse models, or work with them to bring personalized assets into the digital space.
In one example, Landau walked through the world created for one of its clients, PepsiCo.
Up to 36 tables, he said, are available for people to have private conversations in.
Another creation was an auto showroom for General Motors, giving potential customers the ability to see, change and interact with the specs of a vehicle without having it directly in front of them.
Landau says the goal is never to replace face to face, but, instead, supplement what’s already available and provide an opportunity to connect in ways people couldn’t before—beyond a standard Zoom call or FaceTime.
“When you have immersive technologies that make you feel as if you were there, that will make a difference in the future for you to interact with family, with friends, with your loved ones, but also with your peers at work,” Landau said. “We see a world where the metaverse is going to help you enhance those interactions in a way that no other technology has been able to do it.”
The plan for Mytaverse is to continue developing and improving the technology to make it more realistic, with more lifelike avatars with realistic emotions and movements.
In addition to business ventures, the company says it is building toward opportunities to potentially do things like human resources, brand engagement and entertainment.