Weekly Metaverse #128: The rapidly-developing enterprise metaverse
Plus Google Maps directions via AR coming soon!
I’m heading to Seoul for a couple of weeks starting this weekend, so the Weekly Metaverse will be back somewhere between October 24 and October 31 depending on just how jet lagged I am. If you have any recommendations about cool stuff to do in Seoul (particularly cool tech/robotics/etc. stuff that the kind of guy who writes a newsletter about the metaverse might be interested in), please let me know!
San Francisco in the Metaverse
Tesla is creating a simulation of San Francisco in Unreal Engine to train self-driving cars without the risk of, y’know, crashing into stuff. As we’ve talked about here before, I think these sorts of digital twins are going to be immensely useful tools, whether they’re of cities, manufacturing facilities, or anything else where there’s high cost or risk to testing things on them in the real world.
With that said, as someone who lived in San Francisco for the better part of a decade, I question how useful this will be. It’ll capture the weird twists, turns and one way streets, sure, but those aren’t the big driving hazards of San Francisco. Will a tourist driving a rental car start veering out of his lane because he’s never been to the Castro before and is distracted by a couple of guys having a conversation while wearing nothing from the waist down? What about a guy crossing the street while walking his duck (there’s a guy who did semi-regularly this in my old neighborhood)? Any of the many parades that make life a nightmare for Ubers? A simulation of SF without the chaos that is part of its soul is an incomplete simulation indeed.
The Enterprise Metaverse
Anyway, SF’s general insanity aside, the enterprise metaverse appears to be developing more quickly than the consumer side of things. I don’t think that should be wildly shocking - if companies can use AR, VR and the other technologies associated with the metaverse in ways that benefit their bottom line, they will. Consumer metaverse use cases rely on the hopes that if you build it, they will come, but Tesla doesn’t need anyone coming to virtual San Francisco to make the investment worthwhile.
So how are enterprises using the metaverse? This video of RealWear’s new AR glasses is, in your humble newsletter writer’s view, the perfect illustration of not only what the metaverse is, but also how it can be immediately useful for businesses.
I really recommend you watch the video, but I’ll give you the quick highlights - a worker in the field can tag physical objects with labels and other information, which persist when the next worker comes along. He can associate documents with them, so all it takes is a glance to pull up the instruction manual for whatever’s being worked on. Instead of opening up a panel and seeing a tangle of wires or pipes, he’s got perfect labels and the exact information he needs to do his job right in front of him. This kind of tool means work can get done much more quickly with fewer errors by someone with relatively minimal training.
Merging physical spaces with digital information is the essence of the metaverse, and both the technology required for it and the use cases to make investing in that technology worthwhile are already here. The amazing part is that we’re just at the beginning. The technology will get better by leaps and bounds, and the use cases will grow exponentially - just think about the growth in usage of the internet. As more people started to use it and more information was put on it, it became more valuable, and as it became more valuable, more people decided to get on it and put more information on it - a virtuous cycle that I expect to repeat itself (but more quickly) with the metaverse.
That’s why it should be no surprise to see companies like Lenovo trying to establish themselves early in the cycle. Their new ThinkReality VRX headset is on the way, and it’s designed for the enterprise. From a form factor perspective, it certainly looks impressive, and I think that’ll work to their benefit in two ways - it’ll help sell it to enterprise buyers, but it’ll also give users, the vast majority of whom will likely be experiencing VR/AR on it for the first time, a pleasant and positive experience. When it’s time to buy a headset for personal use, you have to imagine they’ll be inclined to look at the brand they’re already familiar with.
Meanwhile, Magic Leap 2 is now available. I don’t really know what to say about them anymore - they’ve had such a lead in terms of money and time to develop an AR headset, but somehow they haven’t managed to corner the market. I do hear the new headset is lightweight and high quality, but at $4,999 for the enterprise edition, it’s easy to imagine that businesses that want to experiment with the metaverse will want to cut their teeth on something much cheaper.
So with that, I’ll leave you with this quote from Tim Cook:
I'm super excited about augmented reality. Because I think that we've had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you look back at a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you'll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet. And so I think it could be that profound, and it's not going to be profound overnight...
I couldn’t possibly agree more. Just substitute smartphones for augmented reality, and you’ll surely see what I mean. When the first iPhone came out, it was a interesting but largely a novelty. That was 15 years ago, and I would bet my firstborn that in 15 years AR will be as ubiquitous a part of life as smartphones are today.
News About the Metaverse
Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'Life without AR will soon be unthinkable' (you’ll want to use Google Translate for this one): More from Cook on the future - he seems like someone worth listening to on the topic.
Education in the metaversity: A win-win for educators and students: A good look from VentureBeat about the metaverse’s future in education.
How COVID-19 changed the healthcare metaverse prognosis: Another great read from VentureBeat on the acceleration of metaverse technologies in healthcare thanks to COVID.
BNV Takes Paris Fashion Week Into the Metaverse With K-Pop Group Lightsum: Fashion continues to be an industry to watch for some really interesting experimentation with the metaverse.
Nike is minting money in the metaverse: Nike is leading the NFT profiteering game. While I don’t consider that a particularly interesting development in the metaverse, I am keeping my eyes on earnings reports - when companies begin to talk about their metaverse efforts making real contributions to revenue, that’ll be a real bellwether for the industry.
Google Maps becomes more immersive and gets an AR upgrade: Soon Google Maps will be able to show you exactly how to get to your destination via an AR overlay. It’s the kind of thing that’s sort of a neat trick on a smartphone but will be a ubiquitous tool on AR glasses.