I’m not a boomer. I’m barely not a millennial, having come into this world at the end of GenX, actually. But I thought it was a catchy title.

A few weeks ago, I dove back into VR after initially deciding it wasn’t for me last summer. And I’m having fun exploring.

For ten weeks earlier this year, I went through an AR and VR development course with Unity and as I moved from headset to code and back in order to test and troubleshoot, I felt very yuck. So I concluded I didn’t like VR and it wasn’t going to work.

I recently decided to give it another shot. I just wrapped up writing a business case for Web3 at work and I’ve started joining some broader team calls in the metaverse. I felt like if I was going to try to convince others we need to be spending time in these spaces, that I needed to get comfortable there myself.

My first metaverse call was joyful and humbling (I joined from my laptop). Having not spent a ton of time in gaming worlds, I found navigation around the space jarring at first. I was learning a new platform live, while my coworkers were hosting a meeting at the same time. I felt a bit vulnerable.

A 40-something white woman with brown hair wearing AirPods accidentally took a selfie from her computer during a metaverse call. She has an amused smile as a result.

I couldn’t help but be amused by accidentally taking a selfie from the platform. Not just real life, folks. Who knew?

I quickly got past that feeling, though, and got excited to play.

 

Screenshot of a metaverse meeting at work. There is a dome-like circular room with a virtual reception area, a few floating avatars, and a digital screenshare in one section

 

 

For one of the next calls in the metaverse, I wanted to test out wearing a headset. I didn’t give myself enough time to figure out how to get there, so I showed up late and with no headset. (It didn’t turn out to be that hard, but it did require a few minutes of research and trials. I eventually figured out how to get to the Meta Quest browser from the headset, go to the metaverse meeting url, enter my code, and voila.)

A 40-something white woman with brown hair wearing a green sweater at her desk in her home office wearing a VR headset

While some of these technologies are fairly new, there are plenty of people who have been in this space for a long time. And that makes it a bit more intimidating to learn as a forty-something, but I’m doing it anyway. And I’ll approach it from a “learning out loud” perspective.