Bill Gates Upbeat On Metaverse Office Space

USA – Microsoft Founder Bill Gates strongly believes that businesses will ultimately implement some type of hybrid office return plan. He also thinks that metaverse is the future of remote office work, reported The Motley Fool on Monday afternoon (10 January, SGT).

“Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids – which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me – to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatar,” said Gates in his 2021 year in review entitled “Reasons for Optimism After a Difficult Year”.

Gates made this forecast prior to the Omicron surge when the Kastle’s Workplace Occupancy Barometer for 2,600 office buildings it is monitoring across the US was stabilizing with 40 percent worker occupancy.

But by 22 December 2021, that figure fell to 30.3 percent and subsequently sharply declined to merely 17.5 percent in the last week of December.

Bill Gates’s bullishness on the Metaverse office space comes after 2 accounting firms purchased office space on the Metaverse. Specifically, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) purchased virtual office space in The Sandbox, while Prager Metis established a presence in Decentraland’s metaverse.

Notably, Decentraland is an open-source 3D virtual world platform where users may buy digital plots of land as non-fungible tokens (NFT). It was opened to the public in February 2020.

The Sandbox is a blockchain-based 3D open world game for smartphones and Microsoft Windows. It was originally developed by game studio Pixowl, but was purchased by Animoca Brands in 2018.

While only a few firms are present in the metaverse, their numbers are growing. With the Omicron variant imperiling workers’ safety and security, companies are looking for a solution that lets staff work together in a communal space without havin