Mesmerise, a U.K. company that helps businesses integrate virtual reality into their operations, has opened its first U.S. office in Santa Monica. Mesmerise said the new office will allow the company to deepen its support for American clients and allowing for expansion.
Founded in 2016, the company’s team has grown six-fold in the last two years. Santa Monica was selected so the company could tap into the city’s ever-growing technology market and talent pool, according to the Mesmerise.
Companies including Morningstar, Wells Fargo and Allianz all use Mesmerise’s software platform called Gatherings to host virtual meetings, conferences and training sessions.
According to the company, Gatherings is designed to give the benefits of co-presence and in-person collaboration while eliminating travel costs and reducing corporate carbon footprints.
“We’ve been pretty early to the metaverse game. It wasn’t referred to as a metaverse when the company was established by our co-founders, but we had seen the potential that immersive technologies like virtual reality or augmented reality would have for businesses,” Sean West, advisory board chair at Mesmerise, said. “We wanted to ride the wave of adoption as companies started to explore that technology, even though we knew it would be a few years out. And that future has now arrived, with Facebook becoming Meta. The time is now for these types of immersive technologies.”
The metaverse is a virtual world similar to the physical world that is created using virtual and augmented realities, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. With the help of VR headsets, users can insert themselves into this world and play games, socialize, shop and do most things they can do in the real world.
As hybrid work and learning environments become status quo, the need for dynamic solutions that establish co-presence, the feeling of being in the same room as someone, is increasing as well, West said.
Into the metaverse
Last June, West organized a reunion of 90 alumni from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program class of 2017. The participants were able to listen to their former professor talk about his new book and then network. The venue? The metaverse.
“All these students who couldn’t have gotten to one location if they wanted to because of visas, and Covid, and costs and conflicts, were able to meet with their ex-professor (Ranjay Gulati) to hear about that person’s new book and now work with each other,” West said.
While virtual reality has long been discussed in the gaming space, entrepreneurs are finding ways to enhance their business operations.
Santa Monica-based venture capital firm, Bold Capital Partners, has worked with Mesmerise, using its gatherings platform to hold meetings with entrepreneurs and investors.
“VR has been around for a while as a concept,” Maxx Bricklin, partner at Bold Capital, said. “The tools are making it more impactful in the enterprise. We are working with (Mesmerise) to figure out how VR can enhance the experiences in the financial services industry.”
Bricklin said in the next five years he predicts that there will be more education surrounding virtual reality across several industries, especially in the education sector.
Earlier this month, for example, Microsoft announced its partnership with Meta to make Microsoft 365 apps and Mesh for Microsoft Teams available on Meta Quest devices. Mesh is designed to help people gather virtually.
“I think as this gets more and more integrated in typical enterprise tools and platforms like Microsoft, you’re going to just naturally start seeing more and more of that happening (elsewhere),” Bricklin said. “This is a hardware system that requires different energy, computing, bandwidth and Wi-Fi, and it’s not going to just roll out horizontally and go to mass market right away. It needs to find its foothold and I think the biggest need is in education.”
Not simple
Bricklin explained that introducing virtual reality into traditional workspaces is not as simple as putting goggles on people, but the collaboration opportunities are much more valuable than other conferencing platforms such as Zoom.
“That means that the value is going to have to be way worth going through the hassle of that,” Bricklin said. “We saw during Covid that Zoom is not engaging. It’s not easy to get a large group of people on there. There are some challenges. I think that’s why it’s got to be super important to have a very specific high-value creation.”
West expects that a majority of companies will have to have a presence in the metaverse but will have challenges in figuring it out.
“We continue to expand because more and more companies want to use these products. They want to first experiment with VR, then when they see the benefits of it, they want to use it,” West explained.
The price of Mesmerise’s services varies depending on whether a company purchases VR headsets through the company or from somewhere else and on how the customer chooses to customize the product. Mesmerise works on connecting its customers to different headset makers but has no official partnerships with any brands. When onboarding a company, Mesmerise provides training resources and works with the business to customize their virtual world to how they see fit for their brand.
During a meeting or conference, participants will be in the virtual reality setting that mimics a physical one. Like in the real world, sound also adjusts depending on where speakers are sitting. For example, West said if a group of three people are in a virtual meeting and the person in the middle were to turn to speak with the person on the right, the one on the left would hear a quieter voice because they are not facing the person speaking.
From a typical office setting to a conference room, the surroundings are also adjusted based on the type of location Mesmerise’s customer wants.
“So the company may say, ‘I don’t want to be in a futuristic conference room with a view of Hong Kong. I want to meet in an office that looks more like my office with a view of my view from downtown Los Angeles.’ So we will customize that,” West said.
“A company will probably spend a bit of money to make sure that the feeling is also their brand and their culture in VR. We will then work with the company to onboard as many people as they’d like into the space. If they’re doing a one-off event or they’re doing a series of events, they may pay us to run the events, but more likely they’re paying to keep their ecosystem in VR live.”
