Conversations around the metaverse are evolving fast. Where discussions used to focus mainly on the gaming industry, today analysts and business managers are increasingly excited about the opportunity for collaborative work within enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). As Jeremy Cowan finds, one of the key catalysts for new attitudes to the metaverse has been Covid, or more particularly, changes to way we work forced on us by the pandemic.
Rewind a few years and – if people thought about the metaverse at all – it was mostly envisaged as a platform for gaming; a futuristic, multi-roomed, virtual world, where legs were sometimes an unnecessary detail. But new uses of virtual and augmented reality in business have demonstrated its relevance to enterprises – with the result that the metaverse is becoming a weapon in the armoury for businesses fighting to overcome the limitations of remote working and scattered teams.
In the wake of his report, Enterprise Metaverse: Future of Work, (https://abi.link/mdeved101) Michael Inouye, a principal analyst at ABI Research said the build-up to the metaverse will push immersive collaboration and related services over US$22 billion by 2030. “The global pandemic engendered a shift to hybrid workforces that most expect to have a long-standing impact on the future of work. Hybrid work, when coupled with the build-up to the metaverse, creates a fertile foundation for both the collaboration market at large and the immersive market.”
ABI expects the nascent immersive collaboration market – by which it means the metaverse for work – to represent nearly 35% of the total collaboration market, which includes software and services, dedicated video collaboration, and hardware. “While some companies are pushing workers to return to the office, a significant section of the working population is committed to maintaining a more flexible, hybrid approach to in-office and remote (work). To support the hybrid workforce more companies are converting (or will convert) more office space for collaboration versus individual offices.”
“This includes an expansion of conference rooms and huddle spaces, and more critically,” added Inouye, “the penetration rates of video-enabled meeting spaces, which by many accounts currently sits below 10% of meeting rooms.”
He believes that virtual communications, moving workflows to the cloud, and the growing presence of immersive experiences (including avatars in video conferencing services and virtual spaces to collaborate), are all precursors to what the future of work will look like.
So, it’s all systems go for metaverse at work?
Well, not entirely. In its technology outlook headlined, Big tech: resilient despite macroeconomic headwinds, Economist Intelligence pointed to difficulties facing Meta Platforms, (formerly Facebook, and now trading as Meta). “Meta is continuing to invest heavily in the metaverse, which necessitates a short term drag on profits,” said the report. “The company has had to increase the price of its flagship Oculus Quest 2 headset by US$100 to pass on higher input costs and reduce losses. It is also facing stricter regulatory scrutiny in the market, with the (US) Federal Trade Commission looking to block its acquisition of Within, a virtual reality company.”
Although huge, Meta is of course just one player. Looking at the bigger picture, ABI also highlights the need for better immersive devices. According to Inouye, a key event for both the consumer and enterprise will be the arrival of mainstream smart glasses. These, he said, “will dramatically shift how and when communications and collaboration can and will happen. They will significantly shift the demands on connectivity, performance of services, and compute – extending opportunities from the metaverse to a wider breadth of companies and industries.”
Is progress being made higher up the delivery chain?
The short answer is Yes. Preparing connectivity for the metaverse is high on the agenda at GSMA’s MWC Las Vegas event (September 28-30). The organisers are pulling no punches, saying: “The metaverse is the future of the internet. Making the metaverse a reality will require significant advancements in network latency, symmetrical bandwidth and overall speed of networks and the current network infrastructures will need to evolve to accommodate the upcoming metaverse platform.”
In a session entitled, Building metaverse-ready networks (https://www.mwclasvegas.com/ ) a panel of heavy-hitters from Accenture, Arrcus, AWS, Civiv, Ericsson and Meta will debate what needs to be done to deliver the metaverse efficiently, profitably and on time.
Digital twins in industry today
At the platform level, NVIDIA has created Omniverse, said to be an easily extensible platform for 3D design collaboration and scalable multi-GPU, real-time, true-to-reality simulation. Creating digital twins in Omniverse already enables companies like BMW, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin and Siemens Energy to create physically accurate virtual replicas of unique objects, processes or environment.
These simulations are continuously synchronised with real-world data inputs and are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). With Omniverse Enterprise digital twins, NVIDIA maintains that factories, 5G networks, power plants and climate research are being achieved faster and at higher fidelity than ever before.
Connectivity, platforms and of course, compute
Intelligent visual cloud workloads are putting enormous pressure on the power to compute. To that end, Intel has just launched its Data Center GPU Flex Series. The aim is to help free customers from siloed and proprietary environments and reduce the need for data centers to use separate, discrete solutions.
This single graphics processing unit (GPU) solution is built to flexibly handle a wide range of workloads. It is also intended to help lower and optimise the total cost of ownership (TCO) for diverse cloud workloads like media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse and other emerging visual cloud use cases.
The Flex Series GPUs are claimed to provide five times greater media transcode throughput performance and twice the decode throughput performance at half the power of competitive solutions. And this is apparently achieved with more than 30% bandwidth improvement for significant TCO savings. These GPUs are designed to provide flexible scaling of AI inference workloads from media analytics to smart cities to medical imaging between CPUs and GPUs, without locking developers into proprietary software.
What else is holding us back?
Enterprises are seeing the metaverse’s potential to solve workflow and production problems. But what of consumers – are they interested?
In his blog, Niall Norton, general manager of Amdocs Networks, said his company’s recent research (https://www.amdocs.com/the-new-gamer) showed over 80% of consumers saw promise in the metaverse but there were barriers to be addressed, including concerns around security and identity (37%) and that their internet connection couldn’t handle it (21%).
“The connectivity devices for users are getting better and will increasingly become very smart ‘fashion accessories’ in much the same way that mobile phones have become,” he added. “But fundamental to the metaverse will be interoperable, immersive, and shared virtual ecosystems, navigable by user-controlled avatars. Low latency connectivity and computing power moving close to the edge are two fundamental capabilities required to make the metaverse a reality, most likely delivered by communications service providers (CSPs). Ubiquitous connectivity will be needed as a foundation for the metaverse, which will be down to them to provide.”
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