Caption: Metavers, a practical vision
From the Hollywood utopia of Ready Player One to the disproportionate arrogance of Facebook claiming to reinvent itself on the Meta, the metaverse has been teasing myths, fantasies, promises, and fears for several years. However, behind the varnish of the media, real uses are beginning to impose themselves in different sectors (real estate, banking, insurance, fashion) and a field of potentially revolutionary possibilities is opening up for our economies, our lifestyles, and the way we work.
Virtual reality and the metaverse are already being used in some experiences for recruitment (particularly for GenerationZ), welcoming new recruits, human resources, meetings, and remote corporate events. France has startups in this sector. Metaverse is also suitable for transmission of teachings, in online education, training and conferences. Microsoft, for example, is integrating Teams, Mesh, and HoloLens to offer a 3D workspace. Finally, virtual reality is making its mark in the industrial and prototyping world, with the advent of digital twins and ultra-realistic environments to reproduce factories or constructions, in infrastructure or real estate. On the consumer side, it is the world of luxury and fashion that feels like a toxin, with the proliferation of experiences, virtual clothing, 3D virtual stores and NFTs. But all of these innovations run counter to the technical limitations in building these virtual spaces: 3D is greedy for computing power, and the startups behind these projects struggle to produce all of these same virtual environments and objects, while maintaining synchronization and face-to-face. The effect of these experiences on the face ……..
However, the AI revolution, as we explain in our book, “Metavers a Practical Vision” is in the process of providing the raw building blocks for the true raw vision of the metaverse. Thanks to AI, anyone can, from text (vector) produce images (MidJourney, DallE), audio (ElevenLab), chat avatars (Talk3), even 3D (Skybox) or video (Runway). And the appearance of miniature personal measuring devices, which are somewhat similar to the current spatial, should know no bounds in realism…
Thus, another future of virtual reality emerges, different from the fears surrounding the emergence of a monolithic actor who will lock us day and night in a dystopian virtual space. Artificial intelligence will indeed allow the co-construction of these spaces by the users themselves. From the moment when all it takes is a simple prompt to create a 3D space, an avatar that represents us and speaks with our voice, or even a virtual object, it is users and users who will build these spaces, metaverse companies just define the 3D engine, technology and framework. Better yet, while we sleep or are not active in these metaverses, the AI systems trained by us will continue, like busy bees, this work of creation continues.
If the Metaverse has been more or less always in our collective subconscious, its reality is rapidly aging right now.
Emmanuel Moyrand and Sébastien Laye are the authors of Metavers A Practical Vision published by Eyrolles.
