Sanjay Nand, head of innovation and ventures at the AIE team in London, has been getting to grips with this new immersive technology. “The metaverse is essentially a meta universe within which people can create, communicate, collaborate, and transact,” he says. “Currently, it’s separated into different online experiences that can be accessed with a virtual reality headset, or through a standard computer.”
Every Friday, Sanjay puts on a VR headset and hosts his team meeting inside the metaverse Spatial. “If we’re going to talk about these technologies, we need to embrace them and learn by doing,” he says. “To make it fun for participants, we’ve designed immersive sessions, more recently we conducted a virtual design session where the winning team’s creation was made into an NFT found on OpenSea.”
For Sanjay, the metaverse offers huge potential for businesses to interact with customers in new ways. “We’re currently working with our retail clients to explore how they can enter the metaverse while having a story connected to their physical products,” he says. “For example, whenever a pair of trainers is sold by a brand, a one-to-one NFT could be given to the customer as a digital ‘wearable’ to add to their online avatar. It would act as a token for the brand’s space in the metaverse.”