Last Updated on April 20, 2024 by Saira Farman
What can be done in the Metaverse
According to Gartner, by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least an hour a day in the Metaverse, for work, shopping, education, social media, and entertainment. Unlike current virtual reality, which is mostly used for gaming, this new virtual world could be used for just about anything: work, concerts, travel, movies. Or simply, as a substitute for leaving the house to meet other people . How? With a 3D avatar , a digital representation of ourselves.
– Purchase clothing and virtual goods
Various realities of fashion and luxury are beginning to invest in virtual reality . Balenciaga sells “skins” on Fortnite, Gucci has put a virtual bag on sale and has already launched virtual fashion shows; Dolce & Gabbana got 5.7 million from the sale of 9 Non-Fungible-Tokens, Nike decided to sell “virtual” shoes. On the same line we find Adidas and Benetton. Ray-Ban and Luxottica have created a model of eyewear that allows you to frame and take photographs or make videos to share in real time on social networks. All thanks to an invisible camera positioned inside the frame. A small step towards the metaverse.According to Morgan Stanley , for the fashion and luxury sector, the revenues deriving from virtual reality could amount to 50 billion dollars (about 44 billion euros) by 2030 .
HERE SOME EXAMPLES OF METAVERSE APPLIED TO THE WORLD OF RETAIL
Walmart, the US giant of large-scale retailers, filed on December 30, 2021, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, several new trademarks which, according to the specialized media, would indicate its intention to produce and sell virtual goods, including electronics , home decor, toys, sporting goods and personal care products.
– Purchase land
Carrefour has bought a plot of land equivalent to 36 hectares in the virtual world of the videogame Sandbox. Created by the French studio Pixowl, Sandbox allows individuals and companies to become landowners and use them as they please. According to data from the OpenSea platform, the transaction cost the group 120 units of the Ethereum, just under 300,000 euros. The digital transformation director of Carrefour said that “events or product launches could be organized on this virtual territory. The same choice was made by Warner Music and Coca Cola. The latter has even created a digital collection of its most iconic products.
– Buy houses
The functioning of the real estate market in the metaverse is based on the parcels , plots or lots of land made available by each platform. Users can then buy a piece of land and then build a property on it. Just like in the real world, then, the buying and selling operations can be managed by real estate agents who operate in the metaverse: according to CNBC, currently around 12 companies globally are operating as real estate agents in the metaverse, but the number is continuously growing. An example of all is Metaverse Property , which on its website defines itself as “the first company in the world for the virtual real estate sector”.
– Events Planning
There are already numerous events – fashion shows, meetings, large conferences – that have taken place and are taking place on the Metaverse. Just to cite one example, in March 2022 Würth announced that it had developed its own Metaverse to offer customers the opportunity to have an immersive experience by visiting the company’s many services and products. Reverse, Würth’s Metaverse created with Hevolus , is a virtual place where you can meet and accompany your customers to experiment with the different solutions offered by the company, active on the market since 1963 and today a reference partner for 280,000 professionals worldwide automotive, crafts, construction and industry.Within the Metaverse it will be possible to hold meetings, carry out training activities for customers and collaborators, interact remotely for the presentation of products and for the sharing of projects and systems.
Coderblock , an innovative SME from Palermo specialized in the creation of immersive virtual experiences, has created a first version of its metaverse. During the presentation, visitors to the Coderblock Metaverse had the opportunity to navigate with their avatar to discover the first virtual city among streets, offices, conference rooms, shops, and malls.
-Do training
The Metaverse is proving to be a valid tool for different types of training. For example, Terna, a company that manages about 75,000 kilometers of high and very high voltage lines and about 900 stations throughout the country, uses technologies that relate to the Metaverse for infrastructure development, maintenance, and monitoring activities. Thanks to the technological evolution of gaming and the consequent maturity of the latest definition of avatars, it is possible to reproduce realistic environments that help people both in their movements and in recognizing objects, favoring their training in complete safety. It is possible to access objects remotely, from the various territorial offices scattered throughout the country or even from smart working.
In July 2022 Philip Kotler , the father of modern marketing, chose Olimaint as a partner in creating the first business school in the Metaverse . The headquarters is part of a larger project that sees the debut in Italy of Kotler’s business school, which is called KCBS (Kotler-i Carboni Business School of Impact Marketing) and, founded together with Weevo, a Benefit company engaged in digital marketing, aims to lead Italian companies towards sustainable and virtuous marketing.
There is also a startup that provides training in this innovative universe. Co-founded in Bari in 2019 by Nicola Bonerba and Katherina Ufnarovskaia, the startup Augmented.City in 2021 launched an innovative project in some schools in the city: using the metaverse to motivate students, children and young people up to 14 years old.
-Create experimental projects
At the beginning of 2022, Hyundai Motor Company unveiled its new concept of Metamobility, a crasis between Metaverse and mobility. After announcing Hyundai Mobility Adventure , a metaverse space where users can experience Hyundai Motor’s advanced products and future mobility solutions in September 2021, the Group decided to dive deeper. So he decided to extend the role of mobility to virtual reality (VR), ultimately allowing people to overcome the physical limitations of movement in time and space .
BMW simulated one-to-one-scale virtual cars in the metaverse for six months for its new EV production line before actually building the final layout for the factory. Over those six months, the design changed nearly 30% from the original. The German company hasn’t publicly revealed how much more efficient it was, but said about 30% of what they thought was the best factory in the world on the first day of the simulation had to change in the process. In fact, why not practice first in the metaverse, where at low cost you can do things infinitely, making even what would be impossible in reality happen?
Indeed, many designers are experimenting with new products and services in metaverse-type environments, to understand how they relate to the physical world, before making them collide with reality. During the pandemic, it proved very useful to be able to have metaverse-type design rooms on the Internet, which everyone, from customers to team members, could remotely access and experience Zoom quality 3-D. In short, with the metaverse people are able to do engineering design work in a highly productive way, without having to fly to meet.
