Metaverse: No Time for Fun and Games

For years, the great virtual reality (VR) breakthrough has been expected but it looks as though it didn’t even happen during the pandemic – at least, not in the private sector. But the technology is becoming a great success within many industrial companies.

Whether it’s Sony PlayStation VR, Google Glass or cardboard mounts that can turn any smartphone into a virtual reality (VR) machine, none of these products has brought the promised commercial breakthrough. In fact, some products appear to have stalled completely. Though one might conclude from this that the high hopes many had in these technologies have been dashed, it isn’t necessarily so, because new technologies often reach the mainstream in unexpected ways. The pandemic has wrought a change and VR is finding new applications in business. No longer restricted to a few lighthouse projects from huge companies, the technology has become more versatile, less expensive and much easier to access and many companies have started using VR and will expand its uses in the years to come.

In a virtual reality simulation, users move around in an artificial world, largely disconnected from reality, with the help of technical tools. The immersion is most convincing when VR headsets are used. They are not absolutely necessary, because a lot of content can also be played back on a smartphone or tablet. These viewers become a window into an artificial world. Virtual reality differs from augmented reality (AR) where additional information or media is blended with a real-world, camera-sourced image.

Artificial Worlds

There are two basic ways in which VR experiences can be produced: by developing a virtual world in software from scratch or photographically. Programming an environment can be time consuming and expensive but taking photos and videos that capture an allround view offers a quicker and easier solution. Cameras like the Ricoh Theta or the Insta 360 are available for just a few hundred euros, deliver surprisingly good quality and are almost as easy to operate as conventional cameras.A typical application scenario is in industrial workplaces where complex processes need to be permanently in operation. Until now, they have usually been shut down, or run at reduced speed, to train new employees. The time spent on this familiarisation can be drastically reduced with the help of VR.

Companies can now create VR applications very quickly without the need for external support.

_{Sara Boss, Head of Sales at VRdirect}

Sara Boss, head of sales at VRdirect, explains, “Without having to spend a large budget on it, companies can now create VR applications themselves very quickly and without the need for external support. This option is often used for training purposes in particular."

Playing it Serious

It’s no secret that many professional soccer players are also keen users of game consoles. They are using VR technology to get better training and many premier league clubs are choosing tools from sports technology company Rezzil. Rezzil’s system allows professional players to hone different skills, especially headers. Heading a ball is a health risk, so it is often avoided in training. Being able to practice without any danger gives teams a big advantage on match day. In addition, with full body tracking and methods to analyse cognitive characteristics, like scanning, decision making and pressure coping, the technology helps to improve their general gameplay. It can also be useful in injury rehabilitation when training on the field is not possible.

Virtual Training: VR technology can help professional soccer players hone their skills, for instance headers, without risk of injury. (source ©: Rezzil)

The background for the experience is a video or photo shot from the perspective of an employee at the workspace. A trainee can use this to get an overview of the entire environment without having to actually enter the workplace. “The ability to give people an authentic impression of a workplace without much effort is already enormously helpful. This effect is further enhanced by the inclusion of additional media content,” says Boss.

Windows to the Virtual World: Several manufacturers offer standalone products through which VR experiences can be played back with.

VRDirect offers a platform through which companies can access the virtual infrastructure. Any file hat can be included in a PowerPoint presentation can also be integrated into the VR environment. For example, graphics or videos can be used to clearly show the necessary work steps. Artificial worlds can also be generated by importing computer aided design (CAD) plans instead of realworld images. Rather than redrawing the 3D environment, the relevant data is often available from the original manufacturers and architects. Thanks to standardised interfaces, more companies are finding it easier to go down this route.

Choose Your Reality

Until recently, high-performance computers connected to playback devices were needed to display vivid VR experiences. Now, several manufacturers offer standalone products through which VR experiences can be played back with excellent quality. Besides the Oculus headset from Facebook, HTC’s Vive and Pico’s visor are particularly worth mentioning here. All of them offer technically mature and well equipped devices for just a few hundred euros – and there are specially tailored packages for companies.

Companies are benefiting from VR in a variety of ways. Automotive giant BMW, for example, used the technology to let customers participate in a joint event at the BMW i Motorsport Virtual Garage Experience. Regardless of pandemic constraints, attendance through the use of Pico VR headsets deeply impressed the virtual delegates.

Virtual Showrooms: Automakers are using VR to allow customers to participate in live events without leaving their homes or offices. (source ©: BMW AG)

VR has also enabled telecom company Orange Polska to train over 1.000 employees. The average learning time decreased from four hours to 45 minutes and effectiveness increased. Almost 70 percent of the trainees now think that traditional teaching should be replaced by VR training in the future.

Shortly before Mark Zuckerberg announced a bright future for VR and renamed his company Meta, Facebook’s consumer-market Oculus headsets also expanded into the business arena. Its Horizon Workrooms app has been designed to let people work together in the same virtual room from anywhere in the world.

One particularly impressive use case comes from BSH Hausgeräte, a joint home appliance and digital services venture between Bosch, Siemens and Neff, which has integrated virtual reality as a commonly used tool throughout its factories. VR has allowed BSH to reduce the time and costs for developing new production lines by accelerating the engineering processes.

We can now experience the use of tools with colleagues from different factories virtually.

_{Juan Luis Cihuelo, BSH coordinator}

“Finding ourselves in the same virtual room with suppliers, colleagues and the production machines, we are able to review and release new designs,” explains Juan Luis Cihuelo, BSH coordinator in the Zaragoza plant in Spain.

Staying Healthy

During lockdown, the technology also helped to safeguard the health of staff while keeping production lines running. “We could experience the material supply and the use of tools with colleagues from different factories virtually,” he adds. This large utilisation of VR tools required less effort than previous projects.”In the past, we were focused on highly sophisticated and expensive IT tools for digital factory planning and the specialists required to use these tools, like VR Caves,” says Ralf Nagel, product owner for the Industry 4.0 digital factory at BSH. A Cave, which stands for a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, is an immersive VR environment where projectors are directed at between three and six of the walls of a room sized cube. “However, to be successful in digitalisation,” he continues, “it is necessary to focus on the people, the cultural change and the scalability of the solutions. For us, this means that every engineer worldwide can use VR technology for planning and engineering in daily work and benefit from its integration into our digital factory backbone and the global digital collaboration.”

Just Another Day at the Office: VR will become part of everyday life in the business environment much sooner than in private life, some experts predict. (source ©: Meta)

There is an increasing number of indicators that VR technologies will become part of everyday life in the business environment more quickly than in private life. It makes work easier, saves money and creates new opportunities for collaboration. It also helps people across continents to work together more efficiently and more quickly.

Interview: June Hsieh

Intuitive Experience

An interview with June Hsieh, senior B2B sales manager at HTC Vive, about the impact of VR in business environments.

Do you have the impression that VR technology in companies received a boost from the pandemic?

Companies like VW have been using VR in training since 2016. In an environment where production processes are constantly being optimised, it is extremely difficult to teach employees new procedures under pandemic conditions. Training larger groups is, after all, hardly possible in the company. VR applications make this much easier. In our case, the significant increase in sales of the goggles already shows that companies are using the technology intensively.

VR makes training larger groups during the pandemic much easier.

_{June Hsieh, HTC Vive}

Are there any areas where VR works particularly well?

Many customers use VR technology for training and to familiarise new employees – but there’s also a lot happening in the planning area. Service providers such as Halocline make it easier for companies that have no previous experience in this area to get started.

Isn’t learning to use headsets and the programming process very time-consuming both for companies and employees?

Over time, the application has become quite intuitive. Of course, you need some time to get used to the VR experience but those who get into it quickly, soon get to grips with it. Producing VR content has also become much easier lately. Many newcomers are surprised at how easy integration has become.

Meta What?

It seems like everybody is talking about the metaverse as the next big thing that’s going to revolutionise our online lives. But everyone seems to have their own idea of what the metaverse is.

The term originated in the cyberpunk novel ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson in 1992. In it, everyone in the world shares an ‘imaginary place’ made available to the public over a worldwide fiberoptic network and projected through virtual reality goggles. Online communities have existed since at least the mid-1980s but the metaverse could bring a whole new dimension. Imagine it as being a virtual world which incorporates augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D holographic avatars, video and other media. As the metaverse expands, it will offer a hyperreal alternative world in which people coexist.

John Egan (CEO of L’Atelier BNP Paribas) and his cyber punk novel “Snow Crash”.

Fans of the metaverse envision its users working, playing and staying connected with friends through everything from online concerts and conferences to virtual trips around the world.Interest in pure digital ownership – and the technology that proponents believe can ensure the security of persistent virtual experiences – has spiked dramatically, with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies making the headlines. Virtual productivity platforms are growing, too, with Facebook and Microsoft announcing new ways to collaborate online. Nike is even preparing to sell virtual sneakers and has filed patents to this effect.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier BNP Paribas, said, “This metaverse concept gives us the opportunity to create any universe that we’ve ever imagined.”

For now, spending any part of a workday in the metaverse still seems like a faroff dream for most of the global workforce, with many remaining unconvinced. For them, the memories of the first virtual world, Second Life, may still be too fresh. Second Life is a realtime, immersive social space for people to interact through anonymous avatars. Launched by Linden Labs in 1999, in its heyday it boasted a currency of its own, Linden Dollars, and largely financed itself through the sale of rentals for virtual properties and the income from premium memberships. In 2013, the system had around 36 million registered user accounts but a series of scandals, including the rape of virtual children, caused user numbers to plummet and Second Life is now often derisively referred to as the “avatar graveyard”.

Zuckerberg is betting big on Virtual Reality

To the Metaverse and Beyond

Mark Zuckerberg plans to help build the ‘metaverse’, an ambitious three-dimensional world that will merge real life with a virtual reality existence in an unlimited universe of playgrounds. He predicts that the metaverse will supplant the internet with the bold promise that “you’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine”.

You're going to be able to do almost everything you can imagine.

_{Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta/Facebook}

As CEO of the company, he announced last October that Facebook, the umbrella company that includes the social media giant alongside Instagram and WhatsApp, will be renamed Meta to underscore the importance of the initiative. During the presentation, he outlined some of the experiences that users will be able to enjoy: competing against holograms of Olympic athletes or going to virtual concerts with your friends. In the business world, there will be mixed-reality meetings where some participants are physically present while others beam in from the metaverse as avatars, cartoon-like images of themselves.

The metaverse is no more than a concept at the moment and potential partners like Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia have yet to discuss plumbing issues, such as technical standards and, further down the line, how much compute power will be required and its environmental impact. There are also moral issues to be considered in the light of the recent Facebook Papers revelations about the company’s apparent reluctance to take action against bullying and misinformation on its current platform.

It may be some time before the metaverse virtually becomes a reality. In the meantime, the press is likely to be overpopulated with articles discussing its possibilities and benefits, its limitations and negative impacts. That it will happen in some form or other is beyond question because the 3D virtual world is too attractive and a future reality akin to USS Enterprise’s Holodeck in Star Trek is beguiling.

READ MORE ARTICLES