This is the third part of our webinar Metaverse 101
This wide-ranging discussion covered the difference between the consumer and enterprise metaverse, how digital twins – clones of real world objects and systems – can create value for companies, and the role A.I. will play in Metaverse marketplaces.
This is a transcript of the webinar “Metaverse 101: How It Works and What It Means For Businesses And Investors” held on November 9th, 2021, in which the following leaders from companies that are laying the foundation for the Metaverse participated:
Jason Southern, Head of Segment for Professional Visualization & Virtualization, NVIDIA
Kevin Smith, Chief Technology Officer, EscherCloud
Benny Willen, CEO, Cloudalize
You can also watch the recording of the webinar.
Transcript
Panelist: So, that is, I guess that’s one way the SMB market, these small businesses can take advantage and get in the game, so to speak, and be part of the metaverse and the economy versus everybody.
Benny: Everybody, absolutely. You don’t need to be a big corporation to start with Omniverse, and even a single person can start with Omniverse. And that’s the beauty of the NVIDIA Model here as well, that they enable this. You’re only limited, I would say, by your own creativity as your team in your organization, but that’s just a discussion you need to start. Go get going within your organizations so that your creativity within your organizations can bubble up and that you’re talking about the right things with the right people.
Panelist: So I want to give everyone the opportunity to truly understand why the Metaverse and Omniverse will be as equally a big change?
Jason: It’s a new opportunity, it’s a new market space. It is the brave new world into which we step, and some people have been in this type of virtual world for some time. Let’s take something like Epic Games and Fortnite. Billions of dollars being generated from virtual assets are being created. So if we look at that and then see how that can scale up and scale out, not just in consumer space, but also moving into the enterprise space as well, it’s really going to be the next untapped opportunity to go into.
And as Kevin was saying is, if you’re generating IP within your virtual environment, in your metaverse, for your industry and you’ve got the opportunity to go and monetize that contractually and select through. Then it becomes what’s the framework to put those contracts in place.
And I think this comes to another question that somebody asked in the chat: Does it need to be built on one platform? And I would say it doesn’t have to be built on one platform, but we need to build them interoperable. So if we can go back to the internet, the internet is built around the HTML and then various iterations of HTML through that.
There have been various organizations that have tried to build proprietary platforms that have sat on top of that set alongside it. But, they don’t last very long because they lack that interoperability and the ability for people to extend them and develop and interact with them, so they fall by the wayside. And I think this is why what we’re trying to do here. This is why we chose USD, being this open-source platform for 3D environments as the foundation to build on because it’s open, it’s extensible. People can build their own platforms, and then we can interconnect, share, and collaborate between the teams. And as we said this right at the beginning, there won’t be one virtual world or one virtual environment, one metaverse, one Omniverse. There’ll be lots of these virtual environments, and some of them will be private and ring-fenced, and some of them will be created to interact and share with others. And that’s that those shared environments. That’s where I think that’s where our biggest opportunity for monetization comes from, because trade across borders, whether they be physical or virtual, is what creates opportunity.
Kevin: I think just answer that one of the things that we wrote this down when we first looked in the Metaverse idea years ago, and it’s coming from someone with a very large commodities market background who said the incidents the incident allows you to exchange, communicate trades. But we’ve now sold all the physical things in the world thousand times over. So welcome to the new world of selling all the things we haven’t invented yet. And this is the digital world. So you want to know why this is bigger than the internet? It’s because the internet only allowed us to trade what was right in front of us. Now we can create endless supplies of things to trade so monetized.
Panelist: Because we’re not selling physical things now. Now, we’re selling ideas. Right?
Benny: Yeah. So I was thinking that you’re also increasing the economic participation. In the real world, you’re limited by geographic distances, by all kinds of rules. But in the metaverse, you can collaborate literally with everybody who has an internet connection. So, first of all, your economic participation degree is as large and on an unimaginable massive scale. Second of all, it goes much further than just a 3D virtual world and collaboration. It’s about things we talked about here in this webinar. It’s about A.I. digital twins and being able to simulate that. It’s about having knowledge of the future. What about that? We make a digital twin about our human body. We connect all the data to it that we already have, and we have knowledge about how our human body is going to, you know, be affected in the future. Somehow, how valuable is that? How many business models can you derive from that? Well, it’s an enormous potential, right?
Jason: Annette related to a couple of the questions in the chat around health care and how this allows for collaboration? I think. We saw this with Kobe, and we actually took some of the research data from early date early stages of the COVID virus, and we turned it into visual data so people could visualize the interaction of the virus with cells so they could understand better instead of having huge amounts of data. That is, that is sitting inside a supercomputer that five people on the planet can understand. You can take that and turn it into visual representations and visual information that lots more people can understand and many more people can collaborate with. And a lot of things like that are about connecting those who will have the insight and the creative insight to go. I can see what’s happening here. And then, to be able to do that, this is what goes beyond it, just simply buying and selling virtual assets and digital assets.
This is the opportunity for the creation of what comes next, the development of what comes next, whether it be in chemistry, whether it be in drug discovery, whether it be in health care, like Bennett says, if you can simulate a body, we have the human brain project and the various genome projects going on there. If you can simulate that and visualize it, some people can work very scientifically from paper data. Other people have to see physical models. They have to see a body, they have to see the blood pumping around and be able to interact with that. So this is a further opportunity there, and we’ve already seen partners developing VR, AR and simulated surgery training as well. So leveraging this to educate using this tool to teach people and I think that was also another question in that is we’ve got this information, we’ve got these assets. Not everybody is lucky enough to be in a location where they can go and learn. A subject by interacting with whatever it is that physically interacting with, whether it be car mechanics, whether it’s nuclear science and nuclear physics, building a reactor or maintaining a reactor, working on a submarine.
All these kinds of things, and not everybody gets the opportunity to do that. If you can learn in a virtual environment, you’re giving opportunities and bringing skills to people that would not necessarily have been able to gain access to them. Now there’s a an opportunity to monetize that, but there’s also an opportunity to bring new skills to new people in the market that wouldn’t have had access to that in the past. And then we elevate the knowledge of the planet, we elevate the skills of the planet and we democratize. I think it was Kevin who mentioned earlier, it’s the democratization of data. We have that to some extent with the internet, but now to be able to learn physical skills in a virtual environment. That’s a fantastic opportunity
Panelist: How about emerging markets, where masses may not even have access to technology?
Kevin: So from my perspective, I’m working a lot with emerging markets, with the Cloudalize technology with NVIDIA because of the pioneering legacy infrastructure in some developed nations. They don’t have that. They’re more advanced and many emerging nations than we are in terms of radio communication networks and 5G, 4G, 3G. A lot of the optimization work that’s being done with Cloudalize and NVIDIA to allow these things. We’re able to stream a 50, 60 £100000 supercomputing environment straight to someone’s laptop over 3G in the outskirts of Kenya or Rwandam because they have those networks. So if anything, this will create democratization by nature. But obviously, you do need that governments and the local nations to put in some of the infrastructure to get to that point.
Benny: I would say this technology is leveling the playing field, and it’s this inventive step of streaming pixels versus streaming a model because obviously, your pixel stream will have far less demanding demands on your network than the streaming model data. And so, you know, emerging markets with less sophisticated infrastructure can still leverage high-end technologies by going to streaming pixels. And it also increases security. You cannot reconstruct a model backward from the pixels you’ve received. Right?
Panelist: Can you share your favorite Real-Life examples of businesses, consumers taking advantage of the Metaverse Omniverse, and are there some projects on the horizon that you’re excited about?
Kevin: I’m a gamer. So, I could talk about this all night for me, but the fact that even Fortnite exists is a great thing. Roadblocks, Unfortunately, I wish I had bought shares. My kids spend a lot of money on Roadblocks. But I see the good and bad in these things. I spent a little time with them on some of these worlds, and I am genuinely excited for the ability to do what the Metaverse represents in terms of cross-border trade, the democratization of education, being able to really help and and open up the minds of people. But I’m also really excited to see what the next iteration of Knight comes out with with the extended reality. I like augmented reality and extended reality. For me, that’s where my money is.
Jason: I think for me the most exciting one is that came from just earlier today is the plan to build a model, a virtual model of the planet and to use it for predicting and addressing climate change and to be able to then bring this into the Omniverse so that we can fix the problems that we have today. I think that’s a huge task and it’s exciting. I can also go to the other extreme of something that I find incredibly interesting is fusion reactors. And to be able to simulate those and I have a couple of projects which I probably spend a little bit too much time getting involved in, just because it’s exciting and it’s interesting. It’s something that piqued my interest. And both of those, you know, come to the same results of reducing carbon production, improving the climate at cleaner and better energy for the planet. So those are the sorts of things that I get excited about before even stepping into the consumer space.
Benny: For me, it’s also about the most significant impact things, which are obviously, climate change and making that more real and more tangible for people with Omniverse. But then also by linking A.I. to it. And that’s what you’re doing with EscherCloud and having this opportunity through simulation to save CO2, save water, and build a better planet for everybody by using technology. And that’s super exciting, seeing that technology has bigger impacts as the technology matures.
The transcripts have been edited for spelling and grammatical errors. Any other modifications were done only to increase clarity and understanding.