Metaverse 101: What You Need to Know Before VOE

This special episode is a preview of the free, in-person Voices of Experience event, “Exploring the Metaverse: What it is, why it’s changing our world and how it’s disrupting business.” A panel of experts from Craig Hospital, Crocs, and Kroenke Sports and Entertainment will discuss the issue at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 4, on the University of Denver campus. Learn more about the Voices of Experience event and register to attend in person.

It was once the stuff of sci-fi stories, but in 2023 the metaverse is very real. Virtual reality, mixed reality and extended reality come together for an immersive experience that an increasing number of businesses are dipping their toes into. Colleen Reilly, senior vice president of business development for ImmersiveWorlds, explains how the metaverse works, how companies are putting it to use and what it means for the future.

Show Notes

Colleen Reilly

Colleen Reilly (MS 2000, MBA 2000, PhD 2022) is the senior vice president of business development for ImmersiveWorlds, a VR technology platform providing an immersive experience to enhance mental and physical well-being in the health care and well-being industry. She is also an adjunct faculty member at the Daniels College of Business.

1:10 What the heck is the metaverse?
2:16 “You could be wherever you want”
6:11 VR vs. AR vs. MR vs. XR
7:26 Metaverse in business
11:06 Trouble in (virtual) paradise?
12:23 The future of metaverse technology
15:43 Show notes and credits

In this episode:

In-person Voices of Experience: Registration
Voices of Experience: General information
Forbes: The Proteus Effect, Revisited

Transcript

Lorne Fultonberg
OK, quick origin story. Back when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down, well, everything, it also pushed our signature speaker series online. To help fill the void, we created this podcast. But now Voices of Experience is back, in person, on Tuesday, April 4. Executives from Crocs, Craig Hospital and Kroenke Sports and Entertainment will be on campus discussing the metaverse, a digital world that is changing the way companies do business in every industry. You can register online at daniels.du.edu/voe.

But first, to get you prepared for the event, we created this little “Metaverse 101” guide, featuring Colleen Reilly. She has three degrees from the Daniels College of Business and also teaches courses here in “virtual reality for businesses.” Her day job is the senior vice president of business development for Immersive Worlds, a platform that uses virtual reality technology to enhance mental and physical well-being. We asked her to help us get up to speed before our VOE panel discussion.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Colleen, thank you so much for being here.

Colleen Reilly:
Thank you so much for having me.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Colleen, we’re hosting this event, Voices of Experience. We’re really excited about it. We have a panel of people coming in to talk about the Metaverse and its impact on businesses. And the first question that I had when I heard that was, what the heck is the Metaverse?

Colleen Reilly:
That’s a great question, and I think everybody has that same question. So I’ve got a couple of definitions.

Colleen Reilly:
It’s like instead of being on the internet, you’re in the internet. So the Metaverse is you are having these experiences in that virtual world. The second definition, I am going to get a little bit, but not too detailed. The Metaverse is made up of 3D virtual worlds where people can gather together in avatar form, have experiences. They feel that sense of presence. There’s e-commerce. You can buy things, you can meet new people, and it’s limitless, really.

Lorne Fultonberg:
So being the child of the nineties that I am, what you’re describing sounds a lot like the Sims, which I was playing on my Windows ’98 computer there. Is that what it’s like? You’re a person interacting with this environment around you. There’s a lot of different things you can do. You have an appearance, an avatar. Is that what it’s like?

Colleen Reilly:
Yeah, yeah. Also, you may have heard of Second Life in the 2000s as well. Yeah, basically you’re in this immersive experience, you’ve got your headset on with virtual reality, and you’re able to have complete presence. So you actually feel like you’re in this place and you’re not at home getting interrupted, things like that.

Lorne Fultonberg:
And this place could be anywhere.

Colleen Reilly:
Absolutely. You could be wherever you want. What a really good example, I was talking with a colleague of mine and they were planning to go to Hawaii, but they didn’t know where to stay, and they didn’t know actually what island they wanted to visit. So they put their virtual reality glasses on, and they took a trip to Hawaii and they were able to see Maui and go to the main island. And then they made their choice. They ended up in Maui, but they went to all the different hotels and were able to experience that. So the trip was exactly what they wanted.

Lorne Fultonberg:
So they weren’t actually physically there, but they were able to look around, see what things looked like, how does that work? How is that possible?

Colleen Reilly:
Well, it’s actually possible because when you actually put the headset on, it takes you to a different world. And so you’ve got lots of choices depending on what platform you’re going to be using, or if you’re playing a game or if you’re just meeting your friends for social activity. A really good example that I have been working on with a company called Immersive World is their virtual well-being world. And so in this virtual well-being world, you’ve got an area where you can do your exercises, you can run, you can do swimming, you can do stretching. There’s the ability to have expert trainers that can help you. You can go then maybe to the meditation island or and when you’re there, you can meditate in a sphere, whether it’s the mountains or it’s by the ocean, you can do yoga.

There’s even an area where you’ve got a Tai Chi leader that you could follow. And then there’s an area where you can just hang out by the fire pits and just chat with your friends. It’s an amazing thing in this virtual well-being world, because it’s all about getting that social connection, but helping people improve their overall well-being. And you kind of think of like, well, how do you really do that in the virtual world if you’re just sitting there? But there’s something, and this is really important, there’s something called the Proteus effect. And what the Proteus effect in very simple terms is when you start to take on that digital representation of yourself. So as you’re watching yourself start to exercise, it starts to increase that self-confidence and that self-efficacy. You can do it. And so when you go back into the real life, you have built that feeling and that self-motivation.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Cool. So we hear all these terms now, Colleen, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality, Metaverse, I’m wondering which reality that fits into, or is it a combination of all of those?

Colleen Reilly:
It’s really a combination of all the technology, and we really start with virtual reality, that is the computer generated simulated environment. The next one is augmented reality. Maybe some of you remember Pokemon Go, where you have a digital asset overlay of the real physical world.

Lorne Fultonberg:
You’re walking around with your phone in your hand, and then you see these Pokemon creatures pop up through the camera on your phone.

Colleen Reilly:
Yep, exactly. So we’ve got augmented reality, we’ve got virtual reality. When you combine those, it becomes mixed reality. And the shortcut when you’re talking about all these different technologies is really called XR, extended reality,

Lorne Fultonberg:
And the Metaverse is all of these things, it is extended reality?

Colleen Reilly:
Yes.

Lorne Fultonberg:
As I understand it, and correct me if I’m wrong, the Metaverse was originally something that gamers were primarily using, but now we’re seeing it in all sorts of places. We’re seeing it in business, like you were mentioning. What are some of the newer uses that get you excited and maybe some of the ways that you personally are using it?

Colleen Reilly:
Yeah, so you’re absolutely right. It really started in the gaming world, and there are a lot of gamers out there using Epic or Roblox or numerous different ones. But how are we going to use this in business? There’s so many different use cases. For example, you can do learning and development, you could do operations, you could do sales and marketing, e-commerce. It really is the whole spectrum. But I’d love to give you a couple of examples. So let’s say in learning and development, in our 2D world, often you have a training, and it’s very hard to really integrate that into how you act and how you live, what you say. And with this immersive technology, when you’re learning, you actually have these experiences. So let’s say you are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So you can actually experience what that feels like. And so it helps you build that empathy so you can understand what it is like to be in their shoes versus getting a PowerPoint where it just doesn’t sink in quite as well.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Right, you can be looking through your point of view at somebody who is speaking to you, and you can react and interact in a way that is human while being trained.

Colleen Reilly:
Yeah. There’s also sales and marketing is pretty big right now. This was early or maybe even late last year where Chipotle was marketing, and in the virtual world, you could make a burrito and for every burrito that was made, you get burrito bucks in the real world. So it was pretty cool. And there’s a lot of other big brands that are in the Metaverse. Gucci has a great… The next a hundred years of Gucci. So there’s so much to think about, and the art of what’s possible is still being created.

Lorne Fultonberg:
That’s the exciting part of it. And you told me there are some ways that you personally have been using it.

Colleen Reilly:
So most of what I have been using is for meditation because… Well, for me anyway, when I try to meditate, I start thinking of all the work I have to do or my kids or the pets. And again, when you put this headset on and you go into a completely different world, it’s so much easier, at least for me and for what I’ve read about for most other people that are doing this, is you can have that complete sense of calm. You are completely in the moment, not distracted, and you can be with others or by yourself. So it’s a really powerful experience.

Lorne Fultonberg:
It sounds like it with that immersive…You can’t hide from it when that headset’s on your head. I wanted to ask you also about some of the problems, I guess, for lack of a better word, that have come with this new digital world. It makes sense to me anyway, that even though we’re in a virtual world, our real world problems have followed us. I know there have been cases of privacy concerns. There’s been virtual crime, bullying, sexual harassment, even some forms of sexual assault, you could say. What have been some of the bumps in the road or the drawbacks?

Colleen Reilly:
Yeah, you’re spot on. And that is something that I think is going to be really interesting to see how some of the organizations, enterprises, as they get into the Metaverse, how do they help create this strong ethical parameters so people don’t take advantage of each other. There’s no sexual harassment, and I think that hasn’t completely been fully baked out. I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion on how really to keep this world safe and make sure that those bad things don’t happen. But I think it’s going to take quite a few organizations, quite a few really brilliant people working on this.

Lorne Fultonberg:
When you look at the next five, 10 years for this technology for our world, what do you see as the potential and the business potential for the Metaverse in that time?

Colleen Reilly:
Well, I think there’s business potential almost in every single vertical. And you can realize even right now, so many different companies are using this technology. A lot of the manufacturing companies are already using VR for training. You’ve got a lot of organizations that are using it for, like I said earlier, the learning and development. HR is where I’ve spent a lot of my time and I thought this was really cool and really fascinating. Let’s say you are being recruited for a new job and you’re really, really an attractive employee. So what if you were able to meet the CEO in the virtual world? What if you were able to go to all the different offices and meet your future cohort or your future colleagues? What if you were able to even visit those operations that are outside of maybe the United States, and you would really… I mean, it’d be a fantastic experience before you signed the line and said you were going to join this organization.

And I think one of the other things, and I talked a little bit about this, of how this immersive technology really creates that emotional connection. And after COVID, we all are really craving that emotional connection and solving for loneliness. So I think that that’s another really positive, I know we started talking about the negatives, but I’m actually a little bit more bent to the positive. But in reality, there’s still a lot of negatives that we have to figure out, and a lot of the big organizations kind of leading this and a lot of Epic and Meta and so on, really need to take some real concerted time to figure out, how can we make sure that this is safe for our children as well as adults?

Lorne Fultonberg:
For someone who isn’t that familiar with the Metaverse and how it works, how can they become more proficient in it? Do you have to go there to learn how to use it?

Colleen Reilly:

Yeah, think about gaming. If somebody told you how to do it, but you just couldn’t picture, how do you build something in a different world? You have to go in, a lot of times starting with the gaming is fun because you learn real quick. It’s very easy to use. There’s other ways, the meditation, there’s so many meditation apps right now.

The really interesting thing is, again, we are just at the beginning, even though it’s been talked about for decades, we are just, just at the beginning.

Lorne Fultonberg:
That’s Colleen Riley, a three-time alumni of the University of Denver, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Immersive Worlds, and an adjunct faculty here on campus.

Colleen Reilly:
Thank you so much for having me.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Alright, you’ve passed Metaverse 101. And we hope you’ll graduate to our in-person speaker series event for a deeper dive into the metaverse and how it’s disrupting and changing the business world. Again, that’s on Tuesday, April 4, at 5:30 p.m. on the University of Denver campus. It is completely, 100% free, but you have to register online. Just visit daniels.du.edu/voe to do that.

If you liked what you heard here and you’re not one of our regular listeners, become one! Click subscribe on your favorite app and catch a new episode of the Voices of Experience podcast every month. Today’s business leaders explore topics at the intersection of business and the public good and they share some cool personal stories too.

Chloe Smith engineered this episode. Joshua Muetzel wrote our theme. I’m Lorne Fultonberg, and I’ll see you on April 4 at 5:30 p.m. for the in-person Voices of Experience event: exploring the metaverse.

Metaverse 101: What You Need to Know Before VOE

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