This month, Porsche partnered with XR giant Meta to create an immersive presentation of its upcoming vehicles utilizing the Quest 3 MR headset to demonstrate how emerging Metaverse services can deliver business value.
The company uses the Meta Quest 3 headset to open new ways of collaboration and support for the automotive industry, from event presentations to engineering exercises.
The company notes that traditional automotive collaboration and support processes require “countless” PowerPoint slides. This is a “challenging condition,” the company said.
Microsoft, Apple, and others are working to improve traditional digital presentation methods using spatial computing variants in productivity applications, but more innovative approaches are welcome. Meta seeks to leverage a fully enterprise-grade, immersive shared VR environment to promote its Metaverse vision.
Through the Meta partnership, Porsche allowed multiple attendees to move around and interact in a shared VR environment during a showcase of new and upcoming products.
The company also claims that its move toward MR shows progress toward demonstrating Metaverse use cases, with an engineer representing Porsche adding:
It already feels like presenting this way has become second nature. The storyline of your content works like a traditional presentation. Write notes on a virtual billboard that only the host can see, click on life-size, immersive 3D animations that escape the confines of the screen, and you’ll be standing inside and surrounded by the presentation.
The metaverse space is turbulent. The space faced serious challenges last year, and the metaverse is yet to recover. But corporate partnerships like Porsche’s could present some potential use cases as Metaverse continues to find its first steps.
NVIDIA Omniverse Revitalizes the Automotive Industry
The automotive industry is a growing sector for XR solution providers. From product development to marketing, a variety of immersive services are emerging in the field.
NVIDIA is currently developing Omniverse, a comprehensive XR framework designed to help AR/VR/MR solution providers create immersive workplace applications. At CES 2024, NVIDIA announced several new project partners that bring new levels of XR usability for automotive customers.
NVIDIA is collaborating with several companies, including ITONE, Brickland, Configit, Katana Studio, WPP ZeroLight, and Lotus, to achieve this automotive vision. With this move, NVIDIA aims to help automotive companies leverage XR development tools to match automotive industry use cases, particularly customer experience and auto-configuration tasks.
NVIDIA’s optimized hardware, software, and partner ecosystem can also add value to automotive-focused original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and agencies. The company says OEM workers can leverage Omniverse to work on digital equipment or product pairs. With the latest update, the company has simplified OEM access and provided a streamlined path that requires fewer manual setup procedures.
Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA will introduce digital twins across their production plants in 2023. The partnership leverages NVIDIA’s Omniverse industrial metaverse platform to increase manufacturing efficiency and help Mercedes-Benz save money, time and energy on production.
Jörg Burzer, Member of the Board of Management of the Mercedes-Benz Groupsaid.
Mercedes-Benz is ushering in a new era in automotive manufacturing by integrating digital twins based on artificial intelligence, MB.OS, and Nvidia Omniverse into the MO360 ecosystem. Our new ‘digital-first’ approach will enable us to unlock the efficiency potential and significantly accelerate expansion of the MMA model even before launch across our global production network.
The automotive sector has always paid attention to XR. Because vehicles are such a valuable resource, capital cannot be wasted, and XR can provide an affordable way for the industry to optimize workflows.