Lessons From Working in the Metaverse: Challenges, Choices, and Implications from a Case Study

Abstract

Although the metaverse workspace has the potential to solve some of the drawbacks of remote work while maintaining its benefits, there are few real-world cases of adopting the metaverse as a legitimate workspace and fewer subsequent studies on how to design and operate the metaverse workspace. Thus, questions exist about the organizational or sociotechnical challenges that may emerge and how decisions are made when adopting and operating the metaverse workspace in a real-world setting. To answer such questions, we scrutinized the startup company Zigbang, which has completely replaced their physical office with Soma- a metaverse platform they developed where thousands of people work and other cooperative companies have moved in as tenants. By conducting field observations and semi-structured interviews with various workers and Zigbang's stakeholders, we identify essential design challenges and decisions when adopting a metaverse workspace and highlight the key takeaways learned from the company's trials and errors.