Where Retailers & Manufacturing Partners Will Leverage The Metaverse in 2024

February 12th, 2024 Dijam Panigrahi Leave a comment

Retail is one of the most important areas of today’s business and commercial landscape, and while has evolved over the years it will not go away anytime soon. Technology evolution is a constant in the industry, from the invention of the first cash register in 1883 to barcodes and inventory management methods in 1974.

And while the Internet and mobile technology have also played a major role in this evolution, today the metaverse is poised to bring even more promise to elevating the experience for consumers through greater efficiencies realized by the retailers themselves.

As the industry faces ongoing economic pressures in the coming years, it’s important for retailers to stay ahead of the curve by adopting the latest technology trends. Ultimately, the best technologies for retailers are solutions that remove all barriers to the customer experience and make shopping easier for customers. In recent years, the retail industry has adopted POS systems, CRM platforms, ERP systems, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, retail management software (RMS) and more.

Enabling a Greater Customer Experience

Great customer experiences will continue to be the biggest customer expectation in 2024. Technology continues to do that. Customers expect a seamless, consistent and memorable shopping experience. There has been a lot of interest in metaverse-based immersive digital retail environments where consumers can shop across platforms through AR and VR. VR is the most immersive way to join the metaverse. Although the future of the metaverse is uncertain, retailers are exploring AR and VR solutions to create immersive and fun experiences that allow shoppers to shop in a simulated environment.

Major retailers today, including Hugo Boss, Walmart, and Amazon, allow visitors and shoppers to virtually try on clothing using digital representations of themselves, an extension of the earlier use of AR by furniture companies. In fact, IKEA’s app was one of the first AR apps to be released using Apple’s augmented reality technology.

How Will Retailers Use the Metaverse?

Retailers and their manufacturing partners today are leveraging the metaverse and digital twins to create greater efficiencies in their operations in several ways.

The metaverse refers to a collective virtual shared space that is created by the convergence of physical and virtual reality. It’s a digital universe where users, in this case shoppers, can interact with computer-generated environments and other users in real-time, such as a virtual retailer.

A digital twin is a digital representation or replica of a real-world entity or system. This can include physical objects, processes, or even people – such as virtual items found in a retail environment. Digital twins are created using data from sensors, IoT devices, and other sources to simulate and monitor the behavior and performance of the corresponding real-world entity.

For retailers, the opportunities in 2024 are plentiful. Implementing digital twins of their supply chain processes can provide real-time visibility into inventory, production, and distribution. This helps in identifying bottlenecks, optimizing logistics, and reducing lead times.

Using the metaverse for virtual prototyping and testing of products can accelerate the design and development process. This can lead to faster time-to-market and reduced costs associated with physical prototypes.

Retailers today are identifying possibilities to create virtual stores and showrooms in the metaverse, allowing customers to explore and interact with products in a virtual environment. This enhances the customer experience and can drive online sales.

Along with their manufacturing partners, they are looking into using the metaverse for employee training simulations, especially in manufacturing where complex machinery is involved. This can improve employee skills and safety. This also enables opportunities to create virtual workspaces for teams spread across different locations. This promotes collaboration and communication among team members.

Marketing teams can also benefit from using data from customer interactions in the metaverse to personalize recommendations and marketing strategies, improving customer engagement and loyalty.

Furthermore, the companies can leverage digital twins to remotely monitor and control manufacturing processes and equipment. This is especially beneficial in situations where physical presence may be challenging.

The Importance of 3D & AI in Immersive Mixed Reality

One of the key requirements for metaverse and mixed reality applications is to precisely overlay on an object its model or the digital twin. This helps in providing work instructions for assembly and training, and to catch any errors or defects in manufacturing. The user can also track the object(s) and adjust the rendering as the work progresses.

Most on-device object tracking systems use 2D image and/or marker-based tracking. This severely limits overlay accuracy in 3D because 2D tracking cannot estimate depth with high accuracy, and consequently the scale, and the pose. This means even though users can get what looks like a good match when looking from one angle and/or position, the overlay loses alignment as the user moves around in 6DOF.

Retail and manufacturing users are overcoming these challenges by leveraging 3D environments and AI technology into their immersive mixed reality design/build projects.

Deep learning-based 3D AI allows users to identify 3D objects of arbitrary shape and size in various orientations with high accuracy in the 3D space. This approach is scalable with any arbitrary shape and is amenable to use in enterprise use cases requiring rendering overlay of complex 3D models and digital twins with their real-world counterparts.

Why Working in a Cloud Environment is Crucial

Enterprises and manufacturers should be cautious in how they design and deploy these technologies, because there is a great difference in the platform they are built on and maximized for use.

Even though technologies like AR/VR have been in use for several years, many manufacturers have deployed virtual solutions on the devices, where all the technology data is stored locally, severely limiting the performance and scale needed today’s virtual designs. It limits the ability to conduct knowledge sharing between organizations that can be critical when designing new products and understanding the best way for virtual buildouts.

Manufacturers today are overcoming these limitations by leveraging cloud-based (or remote server based) AR/VR platforms powered by distributed cloud architecture and 3D vision-based AI. These cloud platforms provide the desired performance and scalability to drive innovation in the industry at speed and scale.

By integrating these technologies, retailers and manufacturers can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and enhance both customer and employee experiences in the rapidly evolving landscape of the metaverse.

About The Author

Dijam Panigrahi is Co-founder and COO of GridRaster Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based AR/VR platforms that power compelling high-quality AR/VR experiences on mobile devices for enterprises. For more information, please visit www.gridraster.com.

Global Trade Daily, Technology

Understanding How 3D AI Immersive Mixed Reality & Apple May Transform the Metaverse

September 13th, 2023 Dijam Panigrahi Leave a comment

One of the most significant changes in technology use for daily tasks is about to create major change for companies, enterprises, business leaders, and even consumers alike. The Metaverse’s immersive mixed reality technology is challenging the notion that any technology could have a greater impact than networked computers, the Internet, or even mobile computing, which was virtually unthinkable just a few short years ago.

Couple this with Apple’s recent entry into the virtual headset market, and companies in every industry have the chance to completely introduce new ways in which they design, produce, train staff, and build products on the manufacturing floor.

How Companies Will Leverage “Digital Twins”

The Metaverse is a virtual environment where people, consumers, and workers can come together to communicate, collaborate, and share through a virtual presence on any device. Knowledge workers and things are represented by “digital twins” in the Metaverse, which is being built by today’s IT leaders. This calls for businesses to create immersive virtual worlds, or metaverses, that will enable staff to virtually collaborate using their digital twins through chats, emails, video calls, and even in-person meetings.

Well-known companies like Microsoft, Accenture, and Facebook, which itself is now called Meta, are all paving the way toward this new reality of business, but there are companies working behind the scenes building immersive reality, modeling and simulation technologies that will ultimately power this new Metaverse.

What Companies Can Do with the Metaverse

The Metaverse enables people and professionals to interact with one another in an immersive experience once they are able to co-exist in a virtual environment where they exist as avatars, possibly even as holograms in the future. This implies that users of mixed-reality headsets like the HoloLens or Apple’s new headset as well as regular smartphones and laptops can access virtual settings from virtual meeting applications.

In one of the earlier enterprise-level buildouts, Accenture has been developing a “virtual campus” where its employees meet for coffee, parties, presentations and other virtual events. The company also leverages this virtual meeting space when onboarding new employees so they can build their virtual twins.

Modelling is at the center of powering the Metaverse

In this virtual Metaverse, digital twins based on modeling and simulation play a leading role. Simulation allows companies to take copies of the digital twin, run simulations on it and then identify optimizations that are too complex to find by monitoring the physical environment alone.

For enterprises and businesses leveraging the Metaverse, the power of simulation will be a game-changer in a variety of industries, such as optimizing production planning in the automotive sector, accelerating design in the aerospace sector, improving overall production efficiency for construction manufacturers, and increasing accuracy for consumer packaged goods companies. Many companies are poised to use virtual simulation to generate more revenue and make better business decisions.

Optimum immersive reality systems are needed to support ultra-realistic, high-fidelity digital twin visuals during the modeling and simulation process; precise fusion of the virtual on real world in a multi-platform environment and the ability to demonstrate a variety of realistic environments.

Along with Apple’s new headset, the Metaverse is a new kind of application which is enabled by tight integration between real and virtual worlds. The Metaverse is enabled by multitude of new technologies broadly in five groups as shown below:

Communications and computing infrastructure: Metaverse will need to perform large scale compute-heavy tasks, and access large databases to merge the real and virtual world.
Management Technology: Metaverse will need a lot of resources like energy, compute etc. This layer manages and allocates most optimum resources to run Metaverse.
Fundamental common technology: AI, Spatio-Temporal consistency are fundamental common technology for Metaverse.
Virtual Reality object connection: Metaverse will create 1:1 connection between real and virtual world objects and technologies like blockchain, and identity modeling will enable that.
Virtual Reality Space Convergence: Metaverse will fundamentally need a new medium to interact. AR/VR/MR, BCI, Gaming technologies will enable this.

The Metaverse is going to be important for all businesses, enterprises and consumers. Today, people and employees can only experience the internet when they log online on their computer or mobile device, but with new connectivity, devices and technologies powered by immersive mixed, we’ll be able to experience the internet all around every single day.

Apple has consistently concentrated on utilizing cutting-edge technologies to produce high-value products that ooze the brand’s promise of quality and sophistication over the past few decades. The company’s new headset has the potential to work in tandem with today’s top cloud-based 3D-AI mixed immersive platforms to assist enterprises and business in almost every industry change the way business is conducted, increasing overall efficiencies, lowering costs, and improving profit potential across the entire spectrum.

About The Author

Dijam Panigrahi is Co-founder and COO of GridRaster Inc., a leading provider of 3D AI cloud-based AR/VR platforms that power compelling high-quality AR/VR experiences on mobile devices for enterprises. For more information, please visit www.gridraster.com.

Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software, Technology

Will Your Leadership Stand Up In The Metaverse? How Your Voice Holds The Key

June 3rd, 2022 Miluna Fausch Leave a comment

COVID-19 and the massive shift to remote work led many companies to change the way they hold meetings. They’ve grown accustomed to using virtual meeting apps, but as often happens in the fast-moving technology world, there’s another advancement around the corner, and it will impact businesses across the globe.

No less a technology authority than Bill Gates says the metaverse will be hosting most office meetings within the next two or three years. What that means for company leaders is the power and confidence they transmit with their voice will allow them the opportunity to enhance their executive presence in the new virtual setting, says Dr. Miluna Fausch (www.MilunaFausch.com), a communication coach for executives and the author of Uplevel Your Communication: Evolve Your Presence and Speech to Change Everything.

“As a CEO, executive or business owner, your words, intent, and delivery matter,” Dr. Fausch says. “The leaders who evolve their communication as the metaverse evolves can significantly impact and benefit other people.”

The metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds being built by tech companies. It is housed online and focused on social connection. Participants wear headsets that immerse them in a 3D environment and are represented by digital avatars, which will attend meetings in a virtual office space and interact with co-workers’ avatars. One report says 71% of executives believe the metaverse will be positive for business, and that new virtual reality and augmented reality experiences will transform the products and services companies offer.

Dr. Fausch says whether the meeting environment is virtual or in-person, the leader’s voice has the power to transform their leadership – and their company.

“Projecting leadership in a virtual environment has been a challenging transition for many leaders,” she says. “The new normal of office meetings has increased the stakes for executives and leaders to speak in a voice that is clear, charismatic, courteous, compassionate, courageous and inclusive.”

Dr. Fausch offers these tips to business leaders to project authority and enhance their executive presence in the metaverse through their voice and energy:

Go with the airflow. One’s vocal sound can betray feelings that aren’t conducive to steady, strong leadership. Dr. Fausch says that when people hear voices that are unsupported, in the throat, or containing the excessive use of a glottal or vocal “fry” (when not enough air is flowing through the vocal folds), studies show that the person speaking may be perceived as bored, uninterested or even lazy.

“To craft a voice that is pleasing to our ears and that we will want to listen to, think of your voice as originating from your mouth, not your throat,” she says. “Think of your voice as always moving up and out of your body, driven by the airflow.”

Open your heart. Mental clarity and personal effectiveness, Dr. Fausch says, come from focusing on positive feelings as if they are flowing from our heart. “Imagine or visualize that you are opening your heart space to allow for a connection with other people,” she says. “The HeartMath Institute’s research suggests the heart also is an access point to a source of wisdom and intelligence that we can call upon to live our lives with more balance, greater creativity and enhanced intuitive capacities.”
Prepare and practice your introduction. “Set the tone or atmosphere; in other words, what is the purpose of the meeting?” Dr. Fausch says. “You should think through and practice your welcome and introduction for five minutes. Always set your personal intention before entering a meeting space.” To calm yourself, she recommends counting slowly backwards from 10 while breathing deeply through the nose in between each number.
Mind your virtual manners. “Putting rude and uncivil dialogue out there will never benefit the world,” Dr. Fausch says. “You can ruin the reputation of both yourself and your company by not paying attention to how you and your associates are communicating.”

“As the world goes remote and beyond into the metaverse, it’s vital for leaders to master the sound and reach of their voice,” Dr. Fausch says. “It’s fundamental to strong leadership.”

About Dr. Miluna Fausch

Dr. Miluna Fausch (www.MilunaFausch.com) is an intuitive sound healer and the author of Uplevel Your Communication: Evolve Your Presence and Speech to Change Everything. She created her proprietary Vocal Archetypes℠ to train conscientious C-suite executives and thought leaders in confident, high-frequency speaking, voice and presence. Dr. Fausch has a Ph.D. in holistic psychology, is certified as a holistic health counselor practitioner and as a Miracle-Minded Coach by Marianne Williamson. She has extensive training in voice, acting, and energy healing.

Archives, Global Trade Daily, Special Reports

Metaverse: a new way for businesses to connect with consumers?

March 4th, 2022 Eva Martín, CEO at Tiendeo Leave a comment

Although not a new concept and with a long road ahead, the “Metaverse” is currently seen as the future of the Internet, which is why technology giants such as Meta, Google and Apple are competing to be number one in the race to dominate the metaverse.

Eva Martín, CEO at Tiendeo, a company that specializes in the digitalization of the retail sector, kicks off the debate with the following question: Are we facing a fleeting fad or a new world that is opening the doors to a powerful business model? By way of introduction, he invites us to ask ourselves what we think of the metaverse, to enter this world to find out how it is changing people’s lives, the opportunities it offers retailers and brands to connect with the consumer.

A whole new universe in the making

The Metaverse is a virtual space that we can connect to through devices such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) glasses or helmets and applications that offer the promise of an immersive experience that feels like we are there, interacting with other people and objects.

In this alternative world, everything will be possible through an avatar: buying goods and services, attending concerts, traveling, playing games, and even working. The amazing thing about this universe is that you can teleport from one experience to another without leaving your room. The development of the metaverse seeks to extend the real world into the virtual world by making everyday actions into a spectacle.

What makes the metaverse so appealing?

The great potential of this technology as a business model is what has led several companies to create their own “omniverses”. To be successful they must understand that the user ventures into the metaverse to escape from the real world, because it offers them the alluring possibility of creating their own personality, their own reality: to show themselves as they “feel” they really are, taking the user experience to another level. Brands have seen in the metaverse the opportunity to create that aspirational reality and self-expression that, many times, the user is not able to develop or transfer to his real and physical life.

This introduces a new form of interaction between consumers and brands through the D2A (direct-to-avatar) model where we will no longer buy clothes for ourselves, but for our representation in the metaverse. This opportunity to improve conversions through fully immersive shopping experiences also has other benefits. In this universe, there are no stock or store space limitations, and manufacturing these products does not require raw materials or workshops to create them, so the profit margin is much higher.

The challenge for companies will be to get people to carry out the bulk of their activities in this digital universe, just as we do in the physical world, giving rise to virtual marketplaces that already move large sums of money. This is not so far-fetched in an age where humans are already glued to technology, whether professionally, socially, or both, and it is speculated that by 2030 we will spend more time in the metaverse than in “real life”. As such, the desire to dominate the new virtual spaces reveals an eagerness to control the way people interact with each other.

The Metaverse at the forefront of the retail sector

The opportunities offered by the Metaverse are endless, especially in the field of commerce. Technology company Wildbytes estimates that in the next five years, 70% of major brands will have a presence in the Metaverse. By 2023 some companies are already promising to launch a new product while others are already looking at the possibility of creating malls, boutiques, and virtual stores where avatars will be able to buy NFT products and pay in cryptocurrencies.

The retail sector is one of the most heavily invested in the Metaverse. For example, Gucci has already started selling its own virtual clothing, the Gucci Virtual 25 trainers and H&M has recently launched its first virtual collection through Nintendo’s social simulation game Animal Crossing.

Ikea also uses AR technology in its App to allow customers to create their own spaces and see how furniture would look in the physical world using AR technology.

There are brands that go even further and have no hesitation about making a clear commitment to the Metaverse. This is the case for Nike, which has gone so far as to create its own virtual universe: Nikeland. A space that offers access to various sporting arenas, as well as a showroom where users can equip their avatars with Nike shoes to take part in competitions. The brand also uses it as a testing ground so that younger generations can experience its new products through avatars before purchasing them in real life.

In short, the metaverse revolution holds the promise of a digital experience in which the virtual world and the real world intertwine and merge under a single reality. It is now up to brands and retailers to find their place in it and explore its full potential.

Archives, Commentary, Global Trade Daily, Software

Understanding How Immersive Mixed Reality Will Power the Metaverse

January 30th, 2022 Dijam Panigrahi Leave a comment

The way in which businesses, enterprises, industry leaders and consumers utilize technology for everyday tasks is set to undergo one of the most drastic evolutions ever. Just a few short years ago it was nearly impossible to think any sort of technology could have a greater impact than networked computers, the Internet or even mobile computing, but now immersive mixed reality powering the Metaverse is challenging just that.

How Companies Will Leverage “Digital Twins”

Today’s IT leaders are building the Metaverse – knowledge workers and things being represented by “digital twins” – a virtual world where people, consumers, workers all gather to communicate, collaborate, and share through a virtual presence on any device. This means companies will build immersive virtual spaces, aka metaverses, and it will allow employees to virtually collaborate using their digital twin through chats, emails, video calls and even face-to-face meetings.

What Companies Can Do with the Metaverse

Microsoft in particular believes individuals will engage with one another in an immersive experience once they can co-exist in a virtual setting where they exist as avatars, perhaps even one day as holograms. The company expects people to access virtual settings from its Mesh for Teams application through mixed-reality headsets like HoloLens, as well as everyday smartphones and laptops.

Modeling is at the center of powering the Metaverse

The power of simulation will be an exact game-changer for enterprises and businesses throughout the Metaverse in a variety of industries, such as optimizing production planning in the automotive sector, accelerating design in the aerospace industry, improving overall production efficiency for manufacturers, and increasing accuracy for consumer packaged goods companies, many companies are poised to leverage virtual simulation to make better business decisions and generate the greatest return on investment.

Metaverse is a new kind of application which is enabled by tight integration between real and virtual worlds. Metaverse is enabled by multitude of new technologies broadly in five groups as shown below:

1. Communications and computing infrastructure: Metaverse will need to perform large scale compute-heavy tasks, and access large databases to merge the real and virtual world.

2. Management Technology: Metaverse will need a lot of resources like energy, compute etc. This layer manages and allocates most optimum resources to run Metaverse.

3. Fundamental common technology: AI, Spatio-Temporal consistency are fundamental common technology for Metaverse.

4. Virtual Reality object connection: Metaverse will create 1:1 connection between real and virtual world objects and technologies like blockchain, and identity modeling will enable that.

5. Virtual Reality Space Convergence: Metaverse will fundamentally need a new medium to interact. AR/VR/MR, BCI, Gaming technologies will enable this.

Immersive reality solution providers offer the following foundational technologies to run industrial enterprise Metaverse:

1: Virtual Reality Space convergence:

a: AR/VR:

Ultra-low Latency High Fidelity Rendering: Low latency is extremely critical to provide an immersive experience in Metaverse. AR/VR partners provide unparalleled realism of environments by leveraging ultra-low latency remote rendering on cloud/on premise in full fidelity and wirelessly streaming the solution to affordable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices – HMD, Tablet and Desktop.

High Precision 3D Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Spatial Mapping: Uses high-fidelity remote spatial mapping with high fidelity 3D scene reconstruction, scene segmentation and 3D object recognition using 3D vision and deep learning-based AI with precise fusion of the real and virtual worlds to merge real world and virtual worlds.

Game engine: Consumer game engines have limitations that they can only handle a Metaverse that can fit in a single server. The metaverse will be ever growing as more digital twins are created to simulate real objects in the virtual world. The right AR/VR partners have created a data-centric simulation engine which scales for any complexity of metaverse.

2: Communications and computing infrastructure:

a: Cloud computing/edge computing: Industrial enterprises will always subscribe to multi-cloud, edge cloud. Depending on different factors like data sensitivity, latency, cost, different parts of the Metaverse need to be run at different clouds/edge in a distributed manner. AR/VR partners automate running the Metaverse for industrial enterprise.

b: Messaging framework: In the distributed Metaverse there is a need to update the Metaverse at global scale so users can collaborate seamlessly. AR/VR partners have messaging framework updates distributed to the Metaverse at global scale.

Fundamental common technology:

Security and privacy: Security and privacy is one of the biggest issues facing today’s world. Since Metaverse has the digital twin as an integral part, the Metaverse will have much richer data. The security and privacy in Metaverse cannot be solved by traditional security tools. AR/VR partners have built tools that handle security and privacy related to digital twins.

_______________________________________________________________________

About The Author: Dijam Panigrahi is Co-founder and COO of GridRaster Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based AR/VR platforms that power compelling high-quality AR/VR experiences on mobile devices for enterprises. For more information, please visit www.gridraster.com.

Where Retailers & Manufacturing Partners Will Leverage The Metaverse in 2024

most viewed today