Innovation has always been a driving force for change in the social norm and increasing efficiency in the workplace. This study attempts to understand the acceptance of the metaverse today with predictions of the future whereby the integration of the metaverse has always been the next big thing since the existence of the internet. The technology acceptance model is a framework that is used to investigate whether a new technology will be accepted or rejected by the users. The metaverse is an alternate world through the use of hardware where immersion is improved in comparison to other devices. In a sense, it is the virtual world or a simulation of reality. However, the technology itself is still considered to be new and therefore has room for improvement before it can be a social norm or a tool to be used by companies. This would therefore build a platform to study the acceptance of this technology using technology acceptance model.
TopIntroduction
Technological advancements have always been the driving force of change in the lives of the world population. It can also be agreed upon those technological advancements in terms of computer science have improved human lives in various ways. The next big innovation expected to be a norm in our lives would be immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, (Mystakidis, 2022). The technology itself is expected to be integrated into education, organizations, and entertainment. Today, the technology has been seen to show an increase in interest. Whilst not necessarily with the offerings from Meta, Virtual Reality is continued to be developed to increase immersion by both companies and indie creators. Kamenov (2017) mentioned that these technologies are the main drivers for the computing innovations of the fourth wave today.
With the lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, people have had experience with working from home globally (Anshari et al., 2022a; Juna et al., 2022). This has helped people to realize the potential of remote working and the convenience or efficiency it brings along. With the global lockdown, people understand the possibility of remote working is not as impossible as once thought. As such, it also triggers the possibility or the positive outlook on using VR/AR technology to be integrated into their workplace, (Taylor and Soneji, 2022; Anshari et al., 2022b). The increase in favor of technology has indeed made the platform to be more active than ever before. This may be since during this time, technology is heavily being depended on by companies for the use of geo-tracking, attendance, and remote activities. As such, Metaverse did surprise the world as they have taken the opportunity to announce such a project during the pandemic where people have seen the potential the project could bring. In addition, the aforementioned digital transformation has made VR/AR technology to be a part of the new normal whereby digital life and reality are being merged together, (Bibri and Allam, 2022). The merging of VR/AR to reality is further proven by the fact that the popular Social Virtual Reality Chat known as VRChat has seen a record-breaking number of online users during the pandemic whereby, on PC, the number of users online at a time was as much as 20,000 users, (Lang, 2020).
As such, the need to study the acceptance of this technology arises and with the proven change in perception, it is important to see the progress of the technology in the eyes of the public to help measure their potential. In addition, the use of Metaverse as a platform for knowledge creation and sharing also arises from the understanding of TAM. This is as the acceptance of Metaverse would be needed prior to validating the use of Metaverse for such a goal.