Introduction
Metaverse offers an immersive experience which is shared as well as persistent. We believe it has the potential to not only emerge as many metaverses, but it would lead to many other kinds of shared immersive experiences as well. The future of metaverse focuses on shared experiences, culture and ownership. To start with, we can imagine having a seamless experience of attending a full concert using VR headsets as if it is happening just in front of our eyes. Similarly, one can think of to attend next zoom call in similar manner. During this conversation we can see our friends’ avatar in front of us. Additionally, one can pick clothes of varied fashion labels from a virtual store and try it using their personal digital avatars.
Use Cases of Metaverse
Manufacturing
Testing thousands of potential scenarios for a manufacturing ecosystem is something which Metaverse can not only offer but also share the best strategies for them. This would provide a real time insight to track the health of the performance of their critical equipment.
- Simulations would offer to find answers to various what-if scenarios
- It would also provide the answers as to how to plan the optimisation for them
- It would enable the possibility of tracking the complete production line
- In case of automotive industries companies will be able to simulate the change in the behaviour of Cars with the change in pollution level, weather etc. This would benefit to increase the safety features
- It enables us to perform dangerous simulations without impact the real assets, avoiding any harm to workers or any equipment
- Multiple users can interact remotely using their avatars and collaborate with each other to analyse the simulations in a much better manner
NFT
In the ecosystem of metaverse, NFTs serve as a key concept which enables us to own virtual assets (i.e., real-estate, cars, boats, art, painting or even accessories). NFTs are built on blockchain technology. It provides legal ownership to the corresponding NFT owners. This way when one owns an asset in the metaverse, they get a NFT as contract to the virtual property. NFT popularity exploded last year with recording-breaking, multimillion-dollar sales.
- NFTs enables owning of branded merchandise for customers’ digital avatars which are owned by them only
- One can build a metaverse agnostic avatar which will be minted on a blockchain platform. It will be possible to move this avatar from one metaverse to another
- As we know NFTs are immutable, so any NFT owned by a user cannot be duplicated
- Metaverse enabled gaming platforms offers one to earn rewards in the form of NFTs
Employee Onboarding
Metaverse enables the opportunity to build a platform to make the employee onboarding process much more immersive, interactive and interesting
- Employees will be spending quite a good amount of time on metaverse while performing their orientation training program
- This way multiple training programs can be conducted seamlessly
- While going through the onboarding process Employees can create their own avatar
- To reflect their personality, they can select clothes which suits them
- Instead of face-to-face training or onboarding process, this enables a more engaging experience for the employees rather than the regular remote onboarding process
- While onboarding, it also can enable the opportunity to collect incentives based on the tasks assigned & performed
Employee Onboarding
Metaverse enables translation of physical retail experience into a virtual one. It leads to immediate and more intimate engagement with customers. It offers various kinds of tools, that allows consumers for discovering ways, which would provide a great immersive experience for online shopping which consumers can accomplish in a remote manner. This would make the process of converting visitors into customers much more effective, as compared to the current online\in-store experience.
- Creating visually appealing simulated environments are absolutely vital for the success of any brand
- One needs to focus to create a stimulating and encouraging soundscape which has a significant impact on purchase decisions
- One has to create a digital avatar while entering a virtual metaverse enabled store
- Virtual assistance from store specific avatar makes the journey very interesting
- Customer shares their shopping list and gets guided to the right location of the store
- Multiple options of the required products are shared with the customer by the virtual assistant
- While picking them up, customer gets an immersive experience to get the details of the products and then gradually can place them on their virtual shopping cart
- Additionally, the virtual assistant can suggest related products, accessories and various available offers which could help the customer
- It could connect to customers’ home virtual assistant to verify what all products really, he\she requires
- During checkout one can perform payment using either any existing payment gateways pr with crypto wallets
Agriculture
Metaverse can enable indoor farmers to utilize AR technologies to digitize and monitor plant biology, progression, and collect data around it.
- It will be a powerful tool to not only make that tracking available anytime but also reinvent the intricate education for indoor farming industry
- Metaverse can enable more immersive and interactive ways to train Indoor farmers
- Understanding of the workings of farming purchases, needs, and the functions around it would be simplified with the usage of Metaverse
- Understanding utilization of the new equipment for farming will be much easier in a simulated environment
- Utilizing XR technology farmers can have an immersive experience to track the following
- Soil fertility
- Production quality
- Pests and diseases
- Metaverse also can enable Insurance companies to survey the field virtually for the inspection required to process insurance claims
- Metaverse enables farmers to perform marketing of their produce in an immersive manner on a simulated marketplace
Strategic Recommendations for Metaverse
Metaverse is all about digital inclusion. Only when more and more people start owning the assets digitally it and take part in simulated world experience, it would lead to the concept of digital inclusion.
- Business innovation strategies should whole heartedly focus on the implementation of Metaverse based platforms
- To become metaverse ready on has to start creating 3D and immersive content now to avoid playing catch up later on
- Digital business strategies should be leveraged for participants & infrastructure to accept and take part in Metaverse
- One has to define a clearly articulated strategy, for how they want to take part in world of metaverse, to decide which all types of immersive experiences they want to explore
- As part of emerging technology bandwagon, one has to target all the critical challenges with Metaverse and explore all directions to solve them out
Conclusion
It is expected to have a rapid evolution of the components around Metaverse. But it is definitely recommended to have incremental investment to explore this landscape.
Coforge is actively exploring various aspects of Metaverse and collaborating with platforms like Microsoft Mesh, Virbela etc. There are multiple platforms on Blockchain, AI, VR on which various use cases are been implemented at Coforge. Let’s innovate together to explore various intricacies of Metaverse to have an exciting future.