The era of online work has been ushered in with greater pace since the pandemic, sparking speculation of how the metaverse might play a role in newly digitized enterprise operations. But according to Adam Riggs, the CEO of Frameable Spaces – an online workspace platform – the metaverse doesn’t offer an appealing solution.

The metaverse has been oscillating between hype and happening in recent months. While it was deemed a major disruptive technology during a Gartner IT Symposium 2022 keynote, opposing concerns about network demands, from 5G to fiber, as well as its social impact keep its future clouded in opacity.

When it comes to remote work that goes beyond calendars and meeting links, “that's a real problem, but the metaverse is not the solution to that,” Riggs told SDxCentral.

Frameable looks to mimic the collaborative flow of an in-person office with virtual rooms, like a more seamless and video-enabled Slack. “While people have grown used to typing, it is not an organic human behavior,” he explained.

“The reason why we're doing this is because it allows you to take in a lot of information peripherally that is useful to you for calibrating the opportunities to collaborate with people, and it doesn't require any typing."

To accommodate both the new hybrid-remote work epoch and critical collaboration needed for performance, Riggs says they “are heavily indexing on real-time, synchronous interaction, and we're trying to take as many of the clicks and as much of the typing out as possible, just like in a real office.”

While it isn't unlike some of the proposed purposes of the metaverse, Riggs believes it is a far more appealing and realistic one.

The Metaverse has not proven itself professionally according to Riggs. “What is the problem that it solves, right? I don't know. I mean, I don't have a problem that it solves.”

Riggs acknowledges there are very important and cost-saving augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) training applications. “For the vast majority of the workforce, it's not appealing as a substitute for real life ... [people] don't want to wear these things. They're very expensive, and they require a lot of bandwidth and power," he said.

As it stands, Riggs thinks the mainstream “knowledge work” demographic [such as banking, law, engineering, etc…] has no actual substantial use for it in the enterprise operations sector, and it is more of a hypothetical “novelty."

Riggs believes solutions like the ones Frameable offers, which utilizing the hardware and software “that you have built into your computer right now," are a much more realistic, cost- and network-effective solution to the enterprise operation environment.

When it comes to companies pushing the metaverse today, Riggs said, “I think these are very wealthy companies, their founders and management believe that they can look very far into the future. It's not an attractive future right now. And it’s not the only option."

Riggs is not alone in his perspective on using existing infrastructure. His concerns join a line of concerns on whether the network requirements and 5G enablement of the metaverse can actually be supported – and whether or not the technology may worsen the digital divide.