Metaverse Will Reach Industrial Ecosystems Before Consumers: World Economic Forum

Industry experts from the World Economic Forum (WEF) have bet big on the metaverse sector. An important element of the Web3, metaverse tech is expected to see a widescale industrial adoption before individual consumers begin to come onboard the virtual universe ecosystem. More companies and industrial players are expected to adopt the metaverse tech in order to give a fresh, new-age twist to their advertising, task monitoring, and web-designing methods. Built on blockchain networks, metaverse allows people to exist as avatars in parallel digital realities.

Two parts of the metaverse tech — Digital Twinning and Extended Reality (XR) — have been named by the WEF as the elements with the most promise to finetune the sector.

While Digital Twinning revolves around collecting data and digitising the physical environment around us, XR is an umbrella term that encapsulates Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR).

“We are witnessing the rapid emergence of a metaverse focused solely on industry. So far, digital twins have been used mainly for monitoring and analysis, but the full potential of the industrial metaverse is far greater. As edge and cloud processing capabilities, private 5G wireless networks, and new sensing, interface and AI technologies are added to the mix, we'll move from a state of awareness to a state of control,” Nishant Batra, the Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Nokia wrote in a WEF blog post.

The market opportunity for the metaverse could reach an estimated $800 billion (roughly Rs. 59,58,700 crore) over the next two years, research reports suggest. Social media, gaming, as well as the automobile industry are expected to be beneficiaries of the boom in industrial metaverse adoption.

“We will develop many technologies for the industrial metaverse that will make their way into the consumer metaverse – from micro-optics and advanced haptic interfaces to AI sensing awareness. 5G-Advanced and 6G will enable true XR mobility, while edge and cloud processing capabilities will optimize the performance of metaverse applications not just in industry, but also for consumers,” Batra further noted.

The WEF is reportedly gearing to launch a metaverse venue called the Global Collaboration Village, which will be introduced at Davos in the coming days. This will serve as a virtual destination for organisations and world leaders to meet and work.