Engage Link hands-on: an early look at the “Linkedin of the metaverse”

ENGAGE is one of my favorite social VR applications. So when I saw that yesterday they had finally released ENGAGE Link, the VR world that aims at becoming “the Linkedin of the metaverse”, I couldn’t resist: I immediately donned my Pico 4 and entered it. Here you can find my impressions about it.

Engage Link

Engage is a professional social VR application, very suitable to organize professional workshops and presentations. It has important companies and universities among its frequent users, and I’ve used it myself for some events, too. The company got more than $10M of investment over the years, including important support from HTC Vive, which uses its spaces to organize the virtual events to launch its XR hardware.

Recently, Engage announced it wanted to build Engage Link (previously referred to as Engage Oasis), a professional social VR world, where important universities and companies could have their permanent hub. The idea behind Link is to have all these worlds not as separate entities (like it happens in VRChat or Horizon), but as part of a sort of big interconnected city, and translate in VR what happens inside Linkedin: a place where professional people meet, exchange ideas, and build connections. This is why it has been referred to sometimes as the “Linkedin of the metaverse”.

I have visited it, and so I can tell you today what I liked and what not. Keep in mind that the software has been released yesterday, so it’s still in the early stages (I will come back to this at the end of the article).

Gameplay

Engage Link works like a big city in VR. You enter, and you find yourself in the central plaza. Around you, there is a nice environment that seems like a very modern park, with water, trees, and places where to seat down. There is some relaxing ambient sound in the background. Around you, in the distance, there are is a 360 photo of some big floating islands around you. The idea is that you live in this world of floating islands, and while you navigate in the space, you travel from one to the others. All these islands together constitute the city of “Engage Link”. Thanks to the 360 photo, you understand immediately the concept of “being part of something bigger”.

In the park, you can navigate around, until you find the portals to go to other places. Entering into the portals, you can go to other sections of this big world: for instance, there is an artistic zone with 3D artworks and a cinema; there is a zone dedicated to all the universities (with important universities inside); there is a district for all the companies (with important names like HTC, Lenovo, Pfizer, 3M, etc…), and there is a zone with the personal apartments. Using the portals you can reach all these places. Every place has its own purpose and things you can do: for instance, in the artistic district, I could enter a virtual cinema and watch 2D and 360 movies. In the educational district, I was able to enter the big virtual campus of the University of California and navigate all of it. In the business district, I could see the live stream of some news channel talking about stock trading. While going around, I met a few other people, but since I was shooting the video linked above, I preferred not to speak with them.

Being Engage, you have your usual tablet attached to your hand through which you can configure some settings (e.g. disable the microphone) or travel fast across the locations without having to reach the portals physically. In some places, I had limited interactivity (e.g. I was muted by default) because I was not paying the Plus subscription of Engage.

What I liked about Engage Link

I enjoyed quite a few things on my trip to Engage Link. One of them is for sure the vision: I love going to events also because there I can meet people from the XR community, make friends, and establish meaningful connections. Anyway going to physical events is expensive and time-consuming. Luckily there is Linkedin which lets me meet other people effortlessly by staying at home, but unluckily the connections through Linkedin feel always incomplete because, in the majority of cases, these are just people that comment on my posts or that exchange private messages with me. They lack some human component, like all social media connections.

Engage Link wants to take the best of both worlds, and let you meet in VR professional people from your field while you stay at home. This is thanks to an always-on virtual world you can navigate whenever you want. In this world, you can go visit the hubs of companies, attend events, or just go around, and meet other people that are there with you, and create connections. Of course, it is also useful for the classical use that made Engage popular these years: companies can organize events, meetings, and training sessions inside their permanent hubs among their employees. And universities can do the same with their students. The difference with the “previous” Engage is that spaces are now permanent, and connected one with the other.

I like the idea of having an interconnected virtual city: most social VR worlds just feature fragmented worlds with no connection with each other, while here there is the desire to give the feeling of having a big giant city where everyone belongs. There are various districts, and there are even personal apartments: in the residential area, the Plus subscribers can have their personal space where to invite people for personal gatherings. But all of this is connected inside a single frame, it feels a bit like going to a work trip to a business city like Manhattan in New York.

The graphical style is very “Engage”, which is a bit serious, and elegant, but not that refined. It’s not fantastic, but it’s not bad either, and I think that now is part of the identity of this social world. The environment is very green, and the background feature either ambient sounds like birds chirping or some relaxing music, which make wandering around quite a relaxing experience. The big skyscrapers that you see if you look up give that Manhattan vibes that remind you that you are in a business setting.

Some of the worlds are also worth visiting: the virtual campus of the University of California was very big, and I was impressed by the fact that it featured almost its whole campus. The artistic district featured some very nice buildings inspired by Escher and some 3D assets that represented artworks by Dalì. There was also the possibility of entering into a magical portal and switching gravity, so I immediately found myself walking on the ceiling of the world, and being able to see the top of the skyscrapers below me. This is something I was absolutely not expecting and very fun. It was my favorite part of the whole experience. Visiting the cinemas I could enjoy some movies, and also notice that the Engage team found some solutions in the virtual cinemas that reminded me the ones we used in Venice VR on VRChat (I would be honored if we have been of inspiration for them).

At the end of the day, the experience was overall enjoyable and relaxing, and I could perceive how this world could become in the future, which is very cool. But…

What I haven’t liked about Engage Link

The first thing I noticed when entering Engage Link is that it is still in the early stages. Most of the portals are “coming soon”, and among all the important companies, I could visit only the HTC hub. People around are very few, and the world currently looks a bit like a desert. There are some coming soon cool events, like a concert with Fatboy Slim, but they are, indeed, “coming soon”. So it is really like walking in a city that has not been opened yet. It is quite weird. It looks like the space has been launched a bit too early.

This is confirmed also by the polish needed in some elements: for instance, when entering the portals, I usually had a quick change of image in front of my eyes that was a bit disorienting. The 360 pictures in the background looked quite low-quality on mobile (I guess they reduced the overall resolution for Android) and so seemed a bit “cheap”. The reflections on shiny surfaces had problems, too, and didn’t react properly to my movements (this is a problem I have myself in all Android builds in Unity, so it’s not Engage team’s fault). The framerate in the artistic district was poor, and probably the space should have been optimized more, or split into smaller worlds. The music in some environments sounded a bit like “elevator music” and didn’t fit the high-level business touch this world should aim for. There are other few bugs I could mention, but I think you got the idea.

There are some visible UX problems, too: for instance, every time I tried to enter a new world, a popup asked me if I wanted to download it, and I had to hit the download button. After that, the download started, and when it finished, it asked me for confirmation to go there, and I had to click another button to confirm. Yesterday I had to do this operation for every world I entered, and I have entered at least 10 worlds. At the 10th popup asking me to download, I wanted to kill myself. I mean, if I ask to enter a world, it means I want to enter a world, and the application should do all the necessary operations without asking me if I’m really really sure I want to do it.

The spaces are also too big: walking in VR in these elegant but simple spaces gave me no added value. Considering that in VR now the number of simultaneous people in the same space is limited, having big spaces makes just the environment seem more empty. And this is even worse now that the users are just a few. Plus a big space means that the user has to navigate around for long before being able to do what he/she wants to do. I know that the vision is the one of having a big professional city, but at the end of the day, the vision of the big city is nice only for the first 5-10 minutes. After that, I started using the tablet to navigate from district to district and I tried to walk the minimum possible because walking was just a waste of time. Here we can see the same problem VR supermarkets have: people dream about shopping in VR like in real life, but at the end of the day, scrolling Amazon and buying stuff in 2D is much more efficient. Exploring environments in VR seems a nice idea, but then if there is nothing relevant to do in these places, it is much more efficient just to use shortcuts to go where you want to go.

Another problem was with NPCs. To make the environments look less empty, some NPCs have been added. But they make everything even cringier: they just walk and stop in random places, going through you if you are on their path. And they totally look like Engage players, so when I met the first NPC, I thought it was a real person. I understood only later that NPCs do have not the name tag on top of them like the real players.

It remains also a doubt about the vision: I would love to have something like Engage Link to attend professional events, but I wonder: is this also what I want for going to the office every day? I mean, I think that for events and for internal gatherings (e.g. daily training sessions of a company) a space like this is great. But if I’m entering this world to visit HTC, do I really want to start talking with random people I meet online while walking in the plaza? In real life I don’t start talking to random strangers during the commute, so why should I do this in VR? Social media like Linkedin work because they offer asynchronous interactions that are written, so people don’t have to take the courage they need in face-to-face interactions. When some virtual world aim at being the next-vresion of some social media by offering “real meetings” I’m always not convinced. If people wanted to really talk with everyone, they would spend the days in the street, not on social media.

Final impressions

I love Engage people, and I like the vision they have of creating a professional social VR space. It’s great they have put their product on the market, and in it, it is already possible to see what could be the final goal. And that is a beautiful vision. But as of today, the software is still rough around the edges, and there is a clear need for a polish and a re-thought of some spaces. Also, there are still too few people inside. This is the problem of all social VR worlds: they need people to create value, but they have to offer value to attract people. The usual catch-22. It’s good they have managed to already involve many companies and to organize some events, and I hope this can help in making the world feel more alive.

I truly hope that the Engage team will manage to evolve their space, and maybe 1 year from now, they have solved most of their issues and managed to get a good number of people on board. Developing a full virtual world is hard, and needs time and dedication, so it’s normal they need time to complete it. In the meanwhile, I’m sure that Engage will continue with its usual business of hosting events, university lessons, and training sessions for which it has become famous.

I wish good luck to all the Engage XR team for the future. For sure I’ll keep an eye on how this product will evolve. In the meanwhile, I invite you all to get Engage from one of the many stores it is available, and have a try for yourself!

(Header image by Engage XR)