No Metaverse Without Openness
25/10/2021
Since There’s no Metaverse without openness, what kind of openness do we mean here? The answer to this question comes naturally when we attempt to describe what the Metaverse should be, and that was a major topic in a talk I gave to the graduates and guests of my highschool last week. One way of describing it is as a convergence of several parts:
- Visualisation and communication – usually taken care of with Augmented Reality technology.
- Business system and processes – which drive or are end points of Metaverse interaction.
- Internet of Things – devices which enable two-way interaction between the virtual world and the real world.
Only then we will have the freedom and the flexibility which combining virtual and real worlds can bring.
In between those components, there’s the platform.
The Platform’s job is to Connect Systems and Users
Metaverse use cases that are most interesting to us at Equinox Vision involve connecting the virtual and the real in a meaningful way. Here are some examples:
- You’re walking in front of a shopping mall, and the “Free Guy” character (or a copyright-safe version of him) talks to you and sells you tickets to the movies. Here we have the AR part, which provides visualisation and user interface, an AI bot which can hold a conversation, and an interface to the movie theatre’s ticket sales and reservation systems. A more involved system could prepare / package your popcorn so it’s waiting for you – that would be IoT in action.
- A virtual butler in your hotel room talks to you about the weather – if you selected the “Alfred from Batman” experience – or about the parties now in town if you selected the party animal experience or about how tasty the restaurant’s cook can prepare fava beans with a nice chianti, if you’re that king of a gourmand. Your interactions are accompanied by beautiful videos and photos of actual food, and you know that if smell-o-vision for cell phones ever gets invented, you’d be shoppping for wider pants tomorrow. In the background, the kitchen’s resources and availability is queried, your order is billed on the room or directly, and an IoT-ish bell rings in the kitchen and states your order on the cook’s tablet.
- Information about Sun UV leves being dangerous on the beach is not presented to everyone as just a number, or a graph. Instead, the Metaverse system is more sophisticated and if the user is a child, it shows a scary dragon barring the way to the beach, a much more visual cue, and easier to describe to children: “if you see a dragon there, don’t go!”. This requires connections with IoT sensors, and might even send a signal to the parent if the (still virtual) dragon is bypassed.
Who does these things? We do.
Talk to us at info@equinox.vision about making a pilot for your business!
