Enterprise Metaverse — A Technical Viewpoint
As the “Metaverse” receives increasing mainstream attention and becomes a topic of discussion on many panels, it is time to look under the covers. Ever since “Facebook” changed its name to “Meta” it drove curiosity about who are the other emerging leaders, how do they perceive it. A Google search reveals such names as Microsoft, Roblox, Epic, Unity, Nvidia, and Amazon. In this post, let us visualize the “Metaverse” and the use cases that can leverage this fascinating new domain.
What is the Metaverse?
The world is my Metaverse! Its real its virtual.
The latest tech-industry buzzword has everyone’s attention but what is it? All thought leaders seem to agree that “Metaverse” is an alternate universe where the physical and virtual worlds converge to create new experiences. Neal Stephenson introduced the term “Metaverse” in his novel “Snow Crash” back in the 90s. All science fiction novels and movies portray an alternate universe with fictional characters, environments, and new challenges, and nothing better demonstrates that than Star Trek.
In the early 90s, I visited the Omni Theater in Fort Worth, Texas with its domed theater, 360-degree curvature, an array of speakers, a spherical projector, and instrumented seats. Watching this underwater science movie about beavers created a truly immersive experience. That was my first Metaverse experience.
Virtualization is not a new concept and has been around for quite a while. IBM and VMware virtualized computer hardware, SAP virtualized business processes, AWS virtualized data centers, and Disney World virtualized imagination. Sococo was one of the early companies to enable configuring virtual offices with the entire gamut of conference rooms, meeting hubs, and private offices. The pandemic has proved that businesses can be virtual, operate virtually and people can interact remotely through a variety of tools such as Teams, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Google Meet. Emoticons help express moods and gestures.
Today, the metaverse has received increased attention thanks to the gaming industry, especially Roblox and Fortnite, and Facebook and Microsoft announced major plans. There are conflicting opinions about what the metaverse is.
Facebook, the social media giant enabled users with digital spaces to create identities, interact with friends, share experiences, create or participate in interest groups, debate diverse topics, buy or sell products in a marketplace or develop relationships. “Meta” aims at taking Facebook and their Oculus platform to the next revolution in social interaction with “3D spaces to socialize, learn, collaborate and play”.
Roblox a gaming platform defines the metaverse as marrying social science, computer science, and human behavior to transform how people come together to connect, create, and express themselves through shared experiences in a virtual environment. The platform enables the developer community to create immersive experiences, tools, assets, and a virtual economy.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft discussed his vision of the metaverse and creating an entirely new platform layer intended to bring people, places, and things together in a digital universe supporting both social and commercial communities.
“Metaverse Blockchain” is creating a foundation for building metaverse applications. It provides native support for digital identities, avatars, support for the creation of digital assets and NFTs, the ability to transact with the help of MST (their native token), decentralized exchanges, and wallets. Their goal is to create foundational capabilities for future applications supporting social communities and enterprise applications.
Walmart is the newest entrant. According to CNBC, “ Walmart plans to create its own cryptocurrency and collection of NFTs. Walmart has several new trademarks late last month that indicates its intent to make and sell virtual goods, including electronics, home decorations, toys, sporting goods, and personal care products. In a separate filing, the company said it would offer users a virtual currency, as well as NFTs.”
Potential Enterprise Scenarios
Though investments in metaverse are in virtual social networks and the gaming industry, the applications in the supply chain, healthcare, and other industries are not far away. Imagine two hypothetical scenarios
Supplier Manufacturing Environment
Trust Your Supplier is a supplier risk and qualification platform conceived, built, and operated by us at Chainyard. Suppose, Future Corp., a supplier on TYS wishes to create a virtual representation of its physical manufacturing facilities.
Imagine a 3D graphical representation of the shop floor and the offices created with AI-driven machine vision, digital twins powered by IoT, and displaying assets, control panels, workers, and information dashboards. A digital persona such as an ESG Auditor or Verifier can put on his VR glasses and get a fully immersive experience of the factory floor. He can conduct an audit, touch and feel the controls, talk to a worker, watch dashboards, inspect assets, and review carbon emissions, energy consumption, safety records. Shop floor cameras and gadgets in the real world continuously feed information to their digital versions giving a live view of the operations.
A Virtual Art Gallery
What about a virtual art gallery? A virtual model of an art gallery displaying art exhibits with detailed information about the art. The gallery is realistic with point-of-sale counters, coffee shops, and huddle tables. Multiple digital identities distributed globally can participate in this ecosystem such as the gallery owner, the artists, art lovers, buyers, and adjusters. The artwork would be associated with digital tokens known as NFTs. A visitor could walk through the different aisles, browse paintings, and engage in critical discussions with other participants around in the coffee shop.
If a buyer wishes to buy a painting, he could pay with tokens using his digital wallet and take ownership of the NFT. Key points to note here are NFTs, tokens, transactions, assets, and different personas in a virtual setting.
Concepts in the Metaverse
The Metaverse blends existing technologies and paradigms, advances in consumer hardware such as smart glasses and gaming devices to create new experiences.
Digital Identity: Users will have persistent digital identities that can transcend various virtual communities and ecosystems. A digital identity is equivalent to context-sensitive cryptographic credentials that are issued to people and things to prove identity and access resources such as applications, digital spaces, or information. The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) advances research in self-sovereign digital identity protocols also known as “DIDs” that are universally resolvable. Self-Sovereign Identity technologies give individuals, companies, and things the ability to control and manage their digital identifiers. DIDs could play a critical role in the future.
Avatar: This concept is widely used in social media, but the word is derived from Hinduism and represents an incarnation of a deity in human form on earth. In the context of social media and the metaverse, it is a digital representation of a user in the virtual world and remains persistent until it is destroyed or dies. Using 3D animations and graphics, a person can give character and behavior to their digital identities such as structure, features, skin tone, hair color, style, and attire. Identities may have different avatars to express themselves in different contexts and communities.
Digital Twins: The concept itself is not new. Years ago, while working on a network management solution for MCI (now Verizon), the Network-Element object was created as the digital twin of the actual network element such as a switch or a router. The twin always provided the current state of the physical element, receive alerts, send messages, and control or monitor its state. Physical entities have digital twins in the virtual world. The twins exchange data and react to events occurring in each other’s context.
Digital Assets: Any asset in digital form with a unique identity and attributes could be classified as a digital asset. Assets in digital forms include cryptocurrencies, digital art, music, choreography, and gaming packs. Even physical assets such as real estate, paintings, and things can be represented by their digital twins in the form of tokens as digital assets. Gaming assets include 2D and 3D character packs with different motions and expressions, player assets, skins, emoticons, sound effects, music, and backgrounds. Digital assets take new significance in the form of collectibles that accrue value and are tradable on decentralized exchanges.
Telepresence: This technology has been around since early 2000 and was demonstrated by Nortel and Cisco. The objective was to give an immersive experience to participants in a teleconference as though they are in the same conference room, sitting at the same table interacting with life-size participants, achieved by combining voice, video, data via multi-media communication servers. The Metaverse attempts to create similar experiences using technology such as smart glasses, voice, video, IoT and, AI, and possibly a revamped Omni Theater.
Social Media: Social media has been one of the main influencers in the evolution of the metaverse apart from internet gaming. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Google have all contributed towards shaping the way by which people present themselves, communicate and interact. People couple could take a picture or a video, morph the image, add decorations and text, and post messages. Social media has enabled people to raise awareness about public issues, crowdfund activities or quickly mobilize teams.
Core Technologies that constitute the metaverse?
The following graphic shows technology components that enable a Metaverse:
Blockchain: The blockchain is the most critical component of the Metaverse architecture. By nature, it features transparency, trust, immutability, transaction history, consensus, and smart contracts. The Metaverse will have millions of participants distributed geographically, accessing various applications and assets. Events are generated and actions are taken by participants, assets, and algorithms. This can lead to the potential for conflicts especially if there are token transfers, NFT purchases, asset ownerships, payments, and rewards involved. The blockchain can maintain an immutable auditable chronological record of all events and actions, providing proofs to help resolve disputes, support audits, or check history. Two blockchains treading into the metaverse world:
- Hedera recently announced that its HBAR Foundation and “MetaVRse”, a web-based, low-code 3D creation platform will partner to build metaverse solutions for the world’s largest organizations on the Hedera Network.
- The Metaverse blockchain is a new platform for developing decentralized assets and identities, built on “substrate“ and no-code principles.
Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality: These technologies are the core drivers for the content and visual impact of the metaverse. Virtual reality replaces the real world with a completely new universe as defined by the application. Augmented reality augments the real-world contextual view with information that is not obvious or visible to the human eye. However, Enterprise Metaverse will thrive in a mixed reality world where virtual twins and physical things will interact to transform business workflows.
AI and Machine Learning: The metaverse is a very dynamic and potentially live environment, emulating behavior in or like the real world. AI and ML backend will continuously learn and react to events and observations as they occur. For example, in a smart city setting, let us assume an ML algorithm has learned to recognize crimes based on input received from publicly installed cameras, voice and facial recognition. An ML algorithm could raise alarms in a virtual recreation of the urban setting. In a second example, if an Avatar walks down the trail and observes a fallen tree in its path, it may get alerted about the fallen tree and be forced to change the path. Specialized intelligent software agents also known as BOTs may have continuous engagement with the assets in the metaverse.
IoT or Internet of Things: IoT devices help weave the physical world into digital assets to create virtual experiences. For example, sensors and cameras installed on the shop floor could generate a dynamic 3D virtual assembly line. Digital assets in the virtual shop floor can become alive, generate data, and react to events and alerts.
Gaming Engines: The gaming world deserves plenty of credit for its innovative contributions. Gaming engines provide foundational capabilities such as 3D modeling and 2D asset creation, animation, teleporting, cinematography, sound services, game passes, lobby, leader boards, user and player management among many other services. These core capabilities can help create virtual environments for enterprise use cases such as flight simulation, smart city design, infrastructure and transportation planning, and public health.
Token: A piece of data minted and managed by an instance of the smart contract. Tokens have an identity and a symbol. Fungible tokens belonging to the same contract instance have the same symbol and identity e.g., ETH, BNB, DOT. Non-Fungible tokens each have their own unique identity but the same symbol. The most common standards advanced by Ethereum are
- ERC 20 — A contract that enables the minting and governance of fungible tokens
- ERC 721 — A smart contract that enables the minting and governance of non-fungible tokens (NFT). A minted ERC-721 token is unique and can have a different value than another token from the same Smart Contract. This type of token is associated with non-fungible assets.
Non-Fungible Tokens: also known as NFTs are digital tokens representing unique physical or digital assets. These tokens can change in value over time and trade in exchanges. In a metaverse, assets will change hands as their value increases or players lose them to others in gaming encounters. Good examples of tokens are concert tickets, game packs, and digital art.
Decentralized Finance: The decentralized transformation of Fintech eliminates third-party intermediaries and creates a whole new array of opportunities using crypto such as investing, lending and borrowing, insurance, derivatives asset fractional ownership. DeFi will enable virtual commerce and commercial use cases in the metaverse. Imagine borrowing from “liquidity pools” to pay for an NFT or purchasing a concert ticket.
User Experience and Visual Presentation
Both backend and frontend must work in tandem to generate the experience. The backend is the engine that quietly drives the magic of the metaverse. ML algorithms, IoT-enabled sensors and devices, liquidity pools, smart contracts, and workflows all collaborate to power the incredibly immersive experience of the metaverse.
However, it is the visual presentation of the assets that include avatars, caricatures, audio, video, and special effects that liven the experience. Devices such as the ARVR and 3D Cinema glasses, gaming accessories, and new generation of computer hardware provide a cohesive user experience.
The metaverse requires UX/UI developers with the ability to think out-of-the-box, model visual assets in 3D and 2D, and orchestrate them on the canvas with audio, video, motion, sound effects, backgrounds, and skins. Over time, interoperability and inter-object communication protocols will allow objects to transcend multiple communities. For example, an Avatar may be in an office environment in one verse transition to a picnic or vacation scene in another.
The Model View Controller (MVC) Pattern
If we observe closely, the metaverse is a complex implementation of the traditional MVC design pattern. The complexity comes from many views, many controllers, and many models. The controllers receive inputs from a plethora of components such as the user, AIML algorithms, BOTS, IoT, and the blockchain. The following diagram is a conceptual depiction of the MVC model in a metaverse world.
The controller can be broken into several components such as the blockchain client, identity and access manager, social media integrations, event and notifications manager, and workflow manager. More work by the industry is required to detail the architecture.
Metaverse Use Cases in the Enterprise World
If one could simply think out of the box and let their imagination wild, there is potential for the metaverse to impact a range of use cases. People may engage in 3D simulated virtual spaces to perform regular day-to-day functions such as discussing a product design, simulating an idea, reviewing an incident ticket, conducting audits, or simply attending a team meeting. It is important to define the business case, the effort involved, and the return on investment. Areas, where there can be an impact are:
- Supply Chain
- Factory and Plant Management
- Retail Product Browsing and Shopping
- Brand Development - Trading in NFTs and Collectibles
- Health Care
- Virtual Office and Work Environments
- Entertainment
- Recreation, Travel, and Vacations
- Concerts and Sports Events - Urban Planning using Digital City Twin
- Public Safety and Health - Flight Operations, Training and Battlefield Simulations
Compliance and regulatory requirements will evolve over time as the use cases mature, especially those with financial implications.
Summary
This post tries to peel the layers of the metaverse and understand what it means, technologies that constitute its ecosystem, and potential use cases for enterprise use.
The thoughts expressed in this post are entirely based on the author’s experiences and are not necessarily the views of Chainyard or its leadership. Please provide feedback or engage us in an opportunity via my email at mohan@chainyard.com or reach me on LinkedIn.
We at Chainyard have been helping clients from strategy development to end-to-end solution implementation in their digital transformation journey. “Trust Your Supplier” and “Chainyard” are affiliated to “IT People Corp”.
