METAVERSE – air taxi, buckled my seat belt, and braced myself as the plane took off. Busan, South Korea’s futuristic cityscape, faded away, and a digital avatar with a message appeared on the windshield.
As a wave of motion sickness hit me, I couldn’t respond. When I put on the virtual reality goggles and sat in the seats that moved back and forth and side to side, it felt like I was flying and turning in the air. They also made me feel so sick that I had to close my eyes for the rest of the three-minute ride.
Then again, who doesn’t?
The air taxi mockup by South Korean company SK Telecom was one of the most eye-catching demonstrations at MWC, or Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest telecom industry trade show. At this week’s expo in Barcelona, tech companies and wireless carriers demonstrated advances in connecting people and businesses online, increasingly in new virtual reality worlds dubbed the metaverse.
Visitor Mark Varahona felt woozy after trying the flight experience, but he is still considering purchasing a virtual reality headset required to enter any immersive digital universe.
“I was considering purchasing it before coming here. “And maybe I’ll buy them now,” he said. “They appear to be quite nice.”
The metaverse exploded in popularity after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared it the next big thing for the internet in late 2021, renaming his social media empire and investing tens of billions of dollars in the concept.
The metaverse exploded in popularity.
He portrayed it as a 3D community where people can meet, work, and play, like trying on digital clothes, holding a virtual meeting, or taking an online trip.
However, as the initial excitement fades, concerns about the metaverse’s viability have emerged. According to NPD Research, sales of virtual reality headsets in the United States fell 2% in December compared to the previous year. Reality Labs, which makes Meta Quest headsets, posted an operating loss of $13.7 billion in 2022.
Meta has stated that it intends to employ 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse. “Our expansion in Europe was always a long-term one planned over several years,” the company said when asked for an update. We will continue to support Europe.”
The “metaverse has not vanished,” according to Ben Wood, the principal analyst at CCS Insight. “However, there is much more skepticism about what role it will play, particularly in the consumer domain beyond the obvious areas like gaming.”
The difficulty in defining the metaverse has added to the skepticism. According to Tuong Nguyen, a Gartner analyst specializing in emerging technologies, it is not the same as virtual reality or its cousin, augmented reality.
“So, in the same way, that computers are related to the Internet, AR and VR are very closely related to the metaverse,” he explained. “Think of it as the evolution of the Internet, changing how we interact with the world.”
So, how should the flight simulator of SK Telecom be defined?
“Technically, it’s not metaverse, but kind of metaverse,” Ken Wohn, a company manager, explained.
At French wireless company Orange’s metaverse demonstration
Last year, South Korea’s largest telecom provider collaborated with Joby Aviation of California to develop an electric air taxi service for the country.
According to Wohn, air taxis could one day operate autonomously, using high-speed 5G wireless connections.
At French wireless company Orange’s metaverse demonstration, users were transported to a futuristic neon-hued technoscape with lightning bolts, giant robots, and a falcon carrying a green orb in its talons.
A dancing figure appeared, representing the movements of a real-life dancer wearing motion-capture gear. It was a stunning display, though it needed to be clarified what consumer purpose it served.
It demonstrates how new 5G networks will eliminate lag for metaverse users watching something far away, according to Miguel Angel Almonacid, Orange’s network strategy director for Spain.
Analysts believe the metaverse is better suited to practical purposes in the workplace.
“We’ll see traction first because the barriers aren’t as high,” Gartner’s Nguyen predicted. A worker, for example, could use augmented reality glasses to access diagnostics or an instruction manual.
La Frontera, a Spanish startup, uses the metaverse to provide virtual meetings with “realistic avatars,” according to Marta Ortiz, a business development executive who guided me through the company’s metaverse.
We began our journey on a beach with boulders, palm trees, and a light blue sea. Her avatar appeared as a head and shoulders, with disembodied hands hovering before her chest. We entered a conference room with a boardroom table, where I picked up 3D objects like a toy ray gun and a bottle of Champagne with handheld controllers.
The virtual world could also be useful for displaying products too large to transport easily
Training for risky, repetitive, or highly detailed procedures, such as surgery, is another example of a metaverse application.
The beach vanished, replaced by a burning overturned tanker truck. A fire extinguisher was suspended in midair. Ortiz instructed me to grab it with my virtual hand and spray it at the dying flames.
The virtual world could also be useful for displaying products too large to transport easily, such as private jets.
They may also be too small for humans.
The setting changed to a science-fiction setting, with crimson walls rising around us to represent the inside of a blood vessel. Blood cells in the shape of doughnuts floated by, followed by spiky orbs. The blood vessel’s wall collapsed, revealing pulsing white streaks on a blue background representing neurons in the brain.
La Frontera collaborates with pharmaceutical companies to “demonstrate how a drug works in the body at a cellular level,” according to Ortiz. It was a medicine used to treat multiple sclerosis, which attacks brain neurons.
SOURCE – (AP)
