Bit of a vague title, but hey, the same goes for the entire concept of the ‘metaverse.’ What we mean is: If a real metaverse should appear, will this affect our work as IT administrators? Let’s have a look!

Perhaps it would be good to start with the term ‘metaverse.’ The company that has made the most noise about this in recent months is Facebook, uhm, Meta. However, it wasn’t them that invented it. They speak of ‘the’ metaverse, whereas we would rather speak of ‘a’ metaverse. A metaverse – a contraction of ‘meta’ and ‘universe’ – is best regarded as an extended version of the internet, where you can not only visit flat pages, but also walk around in a 3D world. So, you will be there yourself, at least in the form of an avatar. Perhaps something of an oversimplification, but this is it, in a nutshell.

Who still remembers the virtual world of Second Life? Launched in 2003, this platform (which still exists) was arguably the first real metaverse. Second Life isn’t a game and has no set objective. You can walk around freely and meet other people, buy things, and even work if you want. This is how Zuckerberg and by now a lot of other people probably imagine the metaverse. However, something fundamental has changed since the launch of Second Life: we now have functioning and affordable virtual reality equipment at our disposal. This means that we can now really walk around in the virtual world inside a metaverse.

It is expected that this will also be used professionally. For example, Microsoft is working on a version of Teams where meetings are held virtually in a room. For the system administrator, this means that you have to make provisions to make such meetings possible. VR glasses will become part of asset management! Holographic projections that are part of the corporate network! And if you work for a company that sells products, it may well be that all these products have to be virtually displayed in a 3D shop window.

It is difficult to predict exactly where things will go at the moment, but it is certain that the cloud will play an even more important role in everyday work. Everything that will take place in the metaverse will automatically find its way to the cloud, because in that respect both concepts are more or less synonymous. And you’d better immerse yourself in blockchain and NFTs because they’re going to play a big role in tomorrow’s 3D virtual worlds. Chatting? That’s so 2020. By 2026 (or so) we’ll all be chatting virtually with our avatars on the beach, with our feet in the water.

However, we’re not that far yet. There are several metaverse initiatives, each with limited functionality for the time being. Anyway, with the internet we finally managed to arrive at a unified whole, so why not with the metaverse?

So who knows, your avatar might soon be walking around your cyberspace corporate network, visiting every computer virtually and installing software! Completely automatically, of course, with Easy Software Deployment 15.6.