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Zigbang employees participate in a team meeting that takes place on the metaverse platform Soma. (zigbang) |
Soma is named after the “South of Market” district of San Francisco, home to Twitter and Airbnb. Zigbang has high hopes of building a business complex in the metaverse for innovative global startups, according to a company official.
The new platform is an enhanced version of Metapolis, Zigbang’s metaverse desktop service for local businesses.
“Soma provides additional spaces including concentration areas where an individual can work without any disturbance and social areas, areas for casual encounters,” the official said.
The platform offers more avatar options in terms of skin color and other features, as well as a wide range of desktop decoration choices.
Citing Soma’s slogan, “Change where you work, not how you work”, the platform’s main goal is to enable collaborative work and active communication between staff in the virtual office space, while maintaining the work from home lifestyle.
“As the epidemic approaches, “the future of work” has become a hot topic. Many are giving up working from home. However, it shows some issues, like disconnected communication or a lack of peer networking, which often leads to low productivity,” the company said.
In order to provide the merits of working offline and working online from home, Soma allows workers to engage in face-to-face conversation. If an avatar approaches a co-worker’s avatar, it automatically activates their computer’s webcams so they can have a decent conversation as if facing each other.
This is different from some other metaverse apps, which only provide an online chat service and thus block human interaction, the official added.
Currently, Soma has a thirty-story office building called Proptech Tower and 42 Convention Center, which has 500 seats and six halls where businesses can hold events. Each company can decorate their office space in the tower building, and only authorized personnel can enter the office. Zigbang plans to build more metaverse buildings in the coming months.
With Soma, Zigbang seeks to become a global metaverse hub that enables the feasible recruitment of talented candidates from overseas. Also, all employees of the metaverse office can interact with each other, regardless of their location and nationality.
Starting Friday, the company will release Android, iOS, and PC versions of the Soma app. It will be available in 12 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean.
About 20 South Korean companies currently using the Metapolis application will gradually move their operations to Soma.
Soma Development Co., the US subsidiary of Zigbang, was launched on April 26 and will support its global operations.
By Byun Hye-jin ([email protected])
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