Will the metaverse become an actual revolution?
At the time of writing, the metaverse is on every innovation manager’s agenda. A ubiquitous media topic, is the metaverse just marketing buzz, or will it disrupt how we live, work, consume, and play? The fact is, technologies are converging today to bring cyber experiences to the next level on every front: immersive displays, photogrammetric captures and rendering of environments, and advanced AI that can simulate entire worlds and behaviors, leveraging computing power and accelerated connectivity between systems and persons as never before.
As with previous breakthrough innovations, much attention is given to the retail and consumer impact of these new possibilities: live events in virtual gaming worlds and new shopping experiences from leading consumer brands. One could easily think this is all the metaverse can offer. But just as the internet revolution was not limited to online retailing, gaming, and email marketing, the metaverse will work its way deeper into every facet of day-to-day business operations than a first superficial glance might suggest.
And we have already started to see this in motion. In the 2010s, the first applications of hybrid worlds in the manufacturing space emerged. In partnership with Airbus, we created a digital twin of a full factory that users could dive into for training, monitoring, or even machine control. Over time, those systems are becoming the cradle of hybrid AR/VR collaboration systems for remote maintenance, configuration, and production on industrial sites.
In the same decade, we worked on AI-powered simulations of crowd behavior to help configure mobile networks to work flawlessly during peak usage. A few years later, those simulations have become complete virtual cities, rendered in ultra-HD, crowded with advanced AI pedestrians and drivers. The quality of the photogrammetric rendering of the environment is so good that, beyond connectivity and smart city scenario simulation, this universe can be used for ADAS & computer vision algorithms training and testing.
As we continue our journey along the path of the professional application of immersive realities, new, more complex, elaborate, and sometimes unexpected applications will emerge. Making the best use of them requires solid knowledge of the core business, extensive understanding of the new tech landscape, a disciplined rigor to engineer flawless bases for these new applications… and patience.
It took businesses and consumers a long time to leverage the internet to its full potential. Personalized marketing, e-commerce, and instant messaging weren’t created overnight – they took countless false starts and millions of hours of engineering prowess to refine, and these functions are still being perfected today. The metaverse will follow the same course – the groundwork is laid, but businesses will need more than a connection and a headset to realize its capabilities.