Will 2024 be the year of the industrial metaverse? It’s a familiar question that reflects the questions being asked in the XR space in early 2023.
This time last year, Meta promised that the Metaverse would launch immersive remote communications into the mainstream. October 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noted that “more people are now working in distributed teams, sharing space with colleagues, and still lacking the ability to feel like they are actually together.” However, Meta failed to achieve this goal in 2023. Switch to MR and smart glasses instead.
But while the metaverse was a potentially fruitful space for some enterprise and consumer use cases, it didn’t take the world by storm the way Zuckerberg thought it would. In any case, experts (XR enthusiasts and beyond) have publicly ridiculed some elements of Meta Horizon Worlds: its graphics, monetization requirements, and lack of users.
The XR and Metaverse markets appeared choppy in early 2023, with many seeing Meta’s attempt to introduce immersive worlds to a wider range of users outside of a niche audience of Rec Room and other dedicated services as a failure. Is the metaverse dead? The truth is that the metaverse hasn’t even begun.
Metaverse fell victim to a marketing campaign that greatly confused the market’s perspective. In early 2023, many Metaverse vendors touted how immersive worlds could completely change the way the world works and lives. In reality, specifically, the metaverse is not just a series of immersive worlds.
Metaverse is better defined as a digital framework that provides users with a variety of immersive spatial applications that promote interconnectivity and shared digital services. For example, the Metaverse platform can provide users with a series of remote MR collaboration applications.
The Metaverse platform is not intended for fully immersive VR worlds, but rather enables communication beyond 2D Zoom calls, such as services that allow workers to collaborate via RT3D digital twins in a 360 computing environment accessible through headsets, smartphones, and headsets. Used for any XR application you facilitate. Other devices.
After this period of Metaverse criticism, companies like Apple avoided the term for their own MR devices, and Meta barely mentioned its Horizon service during Connect 2023.
But the metaverse is not dead. The industry is only improving. Now, as we enter the new year, the second half of 2023, industrial metaverse is the new preferred term for shared space applications. This applies not only to traditional immersive worlds, but also to simpler, more accessible MR applications.
Microsoft, AWS, and Meta are all sailing the industrial Metaverse ship through 2024, and key Meta representatives are urging enterprise customers to adopt immersive services today.
Meta uses the industrial Metaverse framework, which Microsoft slowly released in the second half of 2023. But will Microsoft’s investment in the industrial Metaverse pay off? And can Meta and other industrial Metaverse providers succeed in 2024?
Outside of Apple’s spatial computing vision, the XR market appears to be riding the success of the industrial Metaverse. If the technology fails, it could be a devastating blow to the XR market, potentially giving Apple a huge lead in the immersive space race as it promotes its personal brand of shared immersive computing.
But how did Microsoft get to this point? How did the company go from its failed Hololens 2 division to potentially leading the entire XR space with a rebranding roadmap? It started last year.
From HoloLens 2 to the industrial metaverse
Following the Hoirozn Worlds era of the Metaverse in late 2022 and early 2023, the Industrial Metaverse era of 2024 is approaching, and some companies are leveraging this technology today. Microsoft boasts a wide range of enterprise end users.
However, Microsoft’s XR journey hasn’t looked so bright since the beginning of the year.
In June 2022, Hololens resigned due to reports of unethical behavior within the team. Alex Kipman, former head of Hololens and MR at Microsoft. As a result, Hololens project management and development responsibilities were moved to Microsoft’s Windows & Devices division, which resulted in many Hololens engineers moving to Meta.
But after a few months, Microsoft MR Vice President Scott Evans, Microsoft has confirmed that it is developing immersive services despite the revamp. Evans also explained that a new version of Hololens is in the works and will be released when the technology is ready.
Microsoft has said it will only release new headsets if they offer significant performance improvements over previous versions. “Nobody wants to be obsolete in order to have 10% better functionality,” Evans said at the time. “We don’t need a successor yet, but we want to know that there will be one when the time is right.”
The vice president explained that to ensure the success of its next device, the company is currently reviewing the specifications and challenges faced by customers that Hololens 3 can address. This includes display, tracking, sensors, and battery life.
Microsoft’s immersive team has undergone a further overhaul with the closure of its Altspace VR Metaverse platform. Microsoft acquired the service in 2017 following its May 2015 launch. The Metaverse service remained popular among enterprise and consumer end users until it faced stiff competition. Microsoft has decided to end the service on March 10, 2023.
Following Altspace VR’s closure, Microsoft repositioned the Altspace VR team to its Mesh platform, a now-industrial Metaverse product that offers “the broadest opportunities for everyone involved, including creators, partners, and customers.”
At the time of Kipman’s departure and Altspace VR’s closure, it seemed like two nails had been hammered into the Microsoft XR coffin. The company’s rapid adoption of genAI services led to its doubling in size. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Two events marked key points in Microsoft’s XR journey. Both events led Microsoft to reorganize its internal XR department and create the current industry Metaverse roadmap.
Where XR and AI merge
At Microsoft Inspire 2023, an event showcasing the company’s latest innovations, Microsoft hinted at an industry metaverse initiative as part of its AI Cloud Partner Program. In this program, Microsoft partners with leading technology companies to drive growth and innovation toward enterprise-grade AI. As part of this program, Microsoft will now support the development of industrial metaverse solutions and related technologies.
The goal of the partnership is to transform AI, cloud and metaverse solutions to improve enterprise end-user productivity, resilience and sustainability. It will also offer “curated learning paths” to provide end users with resources to adopt workplace XR technologies.
To empower the workforce with its industry metaverse vision, Microsoft is leveraging the following key technologies:
- AI and MLThese include Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI.
- analytics and dataIncludes Azure Databricks, Synapse Analytics (2024), Microsoft Fabric (2024), Microsoft Purview, and Power Platform.
- mixed realityIncludes D365 Field Service, D365 Guides, D365 Remote Assist, HoloLens 2, and Azure Maps.
- simulation Through Microsoft’s Azure HPC offering.
- From cloud to edgeIncludes Azure Arc, Azure Kubernetes Services, AAD, Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and Azure IoT.
- Finally, Microsoft includes: Azure digital twin In the industrial metaverse ecosystem.
Microsoft’s launch of the Industry Metaverse Roadmap as part of its AI Cloud Partner Program is a clear move to advance immersive technologies by incorporating deep investments in OpenAI.
August, Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platforms, Microsoftwrote about the keys to MR success for frontline workers, including integrating MR and AI to build an industrial metaverse. This helps optimize frontline operations.
A Microsoft executive noted the importance and role of integrated technologies such as digital twins, which can be “further enhanced by AI,” saying:
Mixed reality is the eyes and ears of AI. It becomes easier to understand the nuances of your operations for personalized, in-depth learning. The integration of mixed reality and AI accelerates worker training, reduces steps, and provides users with the practical knowledge they need for their current tasks.
Following the launch of Microsoft’s industrial Metaverse roadmap, the company is preparing for the general launch of several XR solutions in early 2024 that deeply integrate AI into each service.
2024: The Year of the Industrial Metaverse
The introduction of Microsoft’s industrial Metaverse solution has been quiet. But as the next month approaches, Microsoft has been working hard to expand its roadmap heading into the new year and Ignite 2023.
In the opening keynote speech at Ignite 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella While talking about the relationship between AI and MR, we mentioned how emerging technologies impact real-world enterprise use cases.
Nadella said:
Combining these two technologies (AI/MR) is truly amazing. This feature has become a reality today. Released in preview by Siemens Energy, Chefron. It’s great to see its power, and I think it will only get stronger in the future. next few years.
Also at Ignite 2023, the company outlined how its industrial Metaverse roadmap will deliver enterprise-ready products.
Microsoft has announced that it will be introducing new avatars to its popular Teams application in January 2024. Microsoft is introducing a no-code toolchain and integrated Unity features to enhance its avatar system. This allows corporate customers to create customized immersive spaces for employee events, training, tours, product showcases, and more to fit their business needs.
XR project managers can choose from a collection of pre-built immersive environments delivered through the Mesh platform, use code-free/Unity tools to customize spaces and create templates that can be accessed and used by the entire organization.
Microsoft will reveal more details about its Mesh for Enterprise service, including additional features such as speaker improvements, attendee engagement options, and interactivity, as it approaches its general availability release in January 2024.
Microsoft also announced an update to its Dynamics 365 platform that provides users with new Metaverse capabilities that integrate cutting-edge technologies such as AI, MR, IoT, and more to provide supportive reality services rather than fully transformative services.
Microsoft also announced that frontline workers using Hololens and Dynamics 365 will be able to access work order information by communicating with Copilot through Microsoft Teams starting this month. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Field Service customers now have free access to Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assistance.
Will the bet pay off?
Microsoft is investing heavily in the industrial Metaverse. The success of the roadmap could reveal the future of Microsoft’s investments in the area. Companies like Microsoft can afford to lose money researching immersive workplace solutions, but given the early 2023 hurdle, it’s safe to assume Microsoft wants to see adoption success in January when it launches its first lineup of XR services. do.
On the other hand, the Industrial Metaverse isn’t the only XR investment Microsoft has invested money into.
Microsoft continues to work to bring HoloLens 2 support to enterprise customers, as well as devices from the likes of HP, Sanofi, and SNC Lavalin.
On the other hand, Microsoft is cautiously supporting MRTK and SDK for creating HoloLens 2 applications.
So while Microsoft’s industrial Metaverse gamble could lead to either a hugely positive outcome or a market defeat, it is important to note that the company has strong backups to remain viable in developing markets.
Moreover, the OpenAI partnership ensures that Microsoft will never be left behind in the emerging technology landscape.