Huge numbers get thrown around when we’re talking about the metaverse. For example, Bloomberg estimates that the global metaverse market opportunity could approach $800 billion as early as next year.McKinsey & Company predicts that the metaverse will generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030. However, despite these impressive valuations, I think we may still be underestimating the real significance of connecting data across parallel real and digital worlds. If we can fuse these worlds together and treat them as one, we have the potential to make work more efficient, industry safer and cities greener.
Not Just For Entertainment
Discussion of the metaverse often relates to gaming and entertainment. Gartner expects the serious games market to grow by 25% by 2025 due to the impact of metaverse technologies, and Apple’s Vision Pro could be one of many catalysts. However, while it might dominate discussion, virtual gaming worlds are one subsection of a multitude of metaverses that mean different things to different people and organizations. For example, in a recent spending forecast covering 2022 to 2026, IDC predicts that spending on virtual reality will be almost split evenly between consumer and commercial applications.
It’s the potential of the metaverse to business that will be most transformative. This is why our company joined the Metaverse Standards Forum—to ensure that open standards are an incubator of innovation at this exciting time for the technology. Commercial and industrial metaverse applications will be game changers.
Real-Time Data And Digital Sandboxes
The business use cases for the metaverse are not limited to immersive video conferencing and digital collaboration in the workplace. These are important, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Gartner predicts that by 2027 “over 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue” (Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Metaverse). And once organizations can build 1-to-1 replications of reality (digital twins) populated with live data, they suddenly have a whole new arena to solve their challenges.
Replicating 1-to-1 reality is the “easy” part of building a metaverse, and there are many technologies that you can use to capture the world or object you want to digitally reproduce. It’s the real-time data inputs that turn digital twins into smart digital reality. As the world changes, so does the digital world—and vice versa: What we learn or simulate in the digital world can then be applied to reality.
Adding the changing conditions of the real world to a digital representation means you can create a highly accurate simulation. This has huge benefits for industries like construction, where the more you can predict, the more successful a build will be. For example, when planning the orientation of a building, you could use real-world weather data to simulate the amount of glare on windows. You could calculate the heating effect and choose between different designs based on a trade-off between light and the environmental and financial costs of cooling.
Assigning Meaning In A Metaverse
By using autonomous technologies and artificial intelligence, a metaverse can become autonomously intelligent, enabling action and decision-making independent of human interaction. With real-world accuracy, ground truth models can suggest what the outcomes of different actions, or the timing of those actions, would be.
In city planning and management, for example, AI can learn to identify urban landscape features from aerial images and develop insights based on how these features change. For example, if a city has an objective to increase tree cover to make streets cooler during the summer months, then a model can be developed based on weather patterns to make predictions on where cover is most needed. Due to global heating, strategies for cooling cities will become increasingly critical, and urban forestry will be a key pillar. Shaded streets might be 11-25 degrees Celsius cooler than unshaded streets, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Spatial Anchoring In Industry
“Colocation” has been used for several years in gaming, allowing multiple people to play in the same physical space that corresponds to the same virtual space. Shared spatial anchoring takes things further by letting users leave things in positions in the physical and virtual space that other players can see in the same position. In February, Meta announced that its headset Quest 2 is now supporting shared spatial anchors: “By loading shared anchors, users can create a common frame of reference so that people in the same physical space can see and interact with the same virtual content.”
This capability has huge potential for businesses in situations where quick access to location-based information could save time and reduce complexity. For example, in maintenance work, an engineer working on a large piece of machinery could use a VR headset to access information about the machinery and then leave a digital note, diagram or video for a colleague working on the same item. In dangerous industries, like mining or nuclear decommissioning, a robot could leave an asset at an exact location on-site for other robots and their users to see when working in the same area.
Digitizing Dangerous Industries
One of the most important advantages of creating metaverses is that it reduces risk to life. In mining, for example, more information means a safer site. Using real-time data sources, a metaverse can be dynamically refreshed to reflect operations happening around the clock. Companies could monitor their entire production and run simulations to predict future outcomes, increasing efficiency. This goes hand in hand with robotic operations, where robots can be sent into areas that are too dangerous for humans to explore.
The capabilities to create metaverses are ready now; we already have the foundations with digital twins. The technology is available for a business to create a virtual representation that spans its life cycle, updated from real-time data that uses simulation, machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques to inform decision-making. How could the metaverse transform your business?
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