Louise Sallé 7:17 a.m., February 16, 2023, modified at 7:21 a.m., February 16, 2023

Students are already preparing for careers in the metaverse, by learning to become virtual reality developers.

Free training, partly financed by the company Meta, has been offered since the fall in several French cities.

The objective: to know how to create, after two years, virtual worlds for companies.

Working in the metaverse… Students are already preparing for it.

Free training, one-third funded by the company Meta (formerly Facebook) and subsidized by local authorities and the State, has just been launched in several towns in France… This is the “Metaverse Academy”. 

In Marseille, Nice, Lyon, Aulnay-sous-bois and Montreuil, a hundred apprentice developers have been learning to code in virtual reality for several months.

Most students complete this training on a work-study basis.

The objective: to know how to create, after two years, virtual worlds for companies.

Europe 1 met students from the first promotion of the Academy of Metavers, in the premises of the school of digital professions "Simplon", in Montreuil, in the Paris region. 

“We tried to redo a forest”

Mikail completes lines of code by typing on his keyboard.

"That's how you can create movements, interactions, modify shapes... There are almost no limits," he enthuses.

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Right next to him, on Nyl's computer screen, tree branches are drawn in dotted lines.

"We tried to redo a forest," explains the young man.

"We put on the helmet and everything is in 3D, that is to say that we have a notion of depth and we can move around in the virtual world, as if we were moving in the real world", explains-t -he.

Both are apprentices in a company that designs virtual worlds for CAC 40 companies, such as Orange.

The profession they are training for is still unclear, because no one can accurately predict what these worlds will be used for in the years to come.

"A few years ago, quite a few companies missed out on the internet movement," Nyl recalls.

“I have the impression that today, companies don't want to miss the development of the metaverse so they launch themselves in advance…. They make a little bit of a bet on the future”, he observes.

Training with 100% guaranteed job opportunities? 

Is training in the metaverse also a gamble?

Gaël is convinced of the interest of his training.

"Whether it is used in apartment visits, in medicine, there are so many areas in which we will be able to use the metaverse!", Assures this former server in retraining.

"It's guaranteed, unless tomorrow everything stops because we have no more electricity," he jokes.

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Only one out of five candidates, approximately, is accepted into this academy.

But the Meta company hopes to open other courses, in partnership with the State.