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Meta, formerly Facebook, has clearly delineated where their technology investments are going to be in the next few years. There are no prizes for the guess; it is indeed Artificial Intelligence, among other critical technologies that Meta expects will deliver the ‘Social Technology’ company it wants to be seen as. This comes after the much-publicized renaming of Facebook as Meta, announced by Zuckerberg in October 2021, where it also announced the availability of the Presence Platform, a tool that enables mixed reality experience on Quest 2 and a $150mn investment in immersive learning. The now famous ‘The Metaverse Value Chain’ by Job Radoff, which identifies the 7-layers of the Metaverse, showcases the enabling technologies that make up the Metaverse. While each of the 7 layers have been in existence for quite some time now, the new model necessitates a rethink on seeing the big picture. In this article, I attempt to align some of the generic use-cases of Artificial Intelligence within each of the seven layers of the Metaverse. But first up, Jon Radoff’s model showing the Metaverse value-chain.

The Layers of the Metaverse
        Jon Radoff's Metaverse Value-chain

Despite the wide acceptance of the present model, the Metaverse is still evolving and there is no single/unique definition that’s acceptable to all. It depends on users and means different things to different people. However, the Metaverse is NOT a tech framework or a platform, but a collection of human experiences brought together for interaction across the physical and digital worlds. The Indian Metaverse ecosystem has already started taking shape and multiple service companies are coming on to the metaverse. In recent times we saw a plethora of Indian providers – both service as well as start-ups gearing up to develop and announce their offerings in this space.

A large part of the activity in India is focused on the gaming side. With 440mn gamers, India represents 16% of the global gaming population. Some of the start-ups that are making their presence felt from India are OneRare, Bolly Heroes Bollyverse, LOKA and Cope.Studio. Virtual space is already available, and large-scale improvements are happening in the areas of immersive experience, and community-based ecosystems. In the coming days, more people are expected to join the Metaverse, creating frameworks and components to make it work. Whether it is creating virtual spaces, or improving accessibility though speech and translation, NFTs (almost at $50bn in 2020 and expected to be $80bn in 2024) or improving real-time decision making leveraging edge analytics powered by low latency connections, Artificial Intelligence is playing a significant role.

Layers of the Metaverse and what to expect:

We are already high on the Metaverse hype cycle.  The following shows what to expect from each of the layers of the Metaverse in the not-too-distant future.

  1. Experience:
    1. Sports, events, music concerts, shopping, immersive theatre, esports
    2. Big brands are moving to the Metaverse, to drive engagement, reach, and scale through hyper-real experiences, driving personalization.
  2. Discovery:
    1. Advertisement networks, social, curation, rating, scores and agents
    2. There is a need to bring more people to experience the Metaverse, leading to aspects of Digital Marketing being adopted here. This includes experiences, content, digital assets, brands, and NFTs
    3. Application Marketplaces giving way to Content Marketplaces
  3. Creator Economy:
    1. The Creator economy ushers in decentralization to a great extent where creators are not limited to 2-3 players. The underlying tenet of the Creator Economy is democratization, which has large-scale opportunities for India – design tools, asset markets, workflow and commerce.
    2. One of the key breakthroughs is the proliferation of tools and workflows via Low-code - No code (LCNC), which makes it easy to create content without the complexities of the underlying infra and computing capabilities.
  4. Spatial Computing:
    1. Since it was first coined in 2003 by Simon Greenwold, developments in the areas of 3D engines, XR, multitasking UI, geospatial mapping are contributing to the adoption of the Metaverse.
    2. It works by imposing a virtual output displayed on top of the real world. One of the key applications of Spatial Computing is in the Industrial & Automotive space. Big manufacturing companies are using Spatial technologies to create Digital Twins which simulate real-life conditions of the shop-floor, operations. 
  5. Decentralization:
    1. Blockchain technology is a large part of the decentralization layer of the Metaverse, along with democratized internet, also known as Web3.0
    2. Edge Computing enabled by low latency internet connectivity and massive computing resources will drive high-end analytics using data from devices, also known as IoT.  Roblox, Decentraland are active in this space.
  6. Human interface
    1. One of the key things that is driving the development of the interface layer is the evolution of the smartphone, which is witnessing integration of high-end compute capabilities.
    2. Then there are smart-glasses, Haptic, 3D printed wearables which include technologies that enhance human experience and perception of the rapidly evolving Metaverse, which Ericsson has termed ‘Internet of Sense’.
  7. Infra – 5/6G, Cloud, GPU:
    1. The best way to describe this is the new AI Supercomputer that Meta has unveiled for the Metaverse.  Known as the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), the supercomputer is expected to accelerate AI research  by helping new and better AI models across different languages and new augmented reality tools.

The following is a curation of select industry initiatives mapped to the 7-layers framework described above.

Company

Product/Feature

Underlying AI Tech

Metaverse Layer alignment

Details

The Road Ahead

Logo

Description automatically generated

Builder Bot Demo

Voice AI/Recognition

  • Experience
  • Spatial Computing

Import objects into the virtual world using voice commands

--

Logo

Description automatically generated

No Language Left Behind

 

Universal Speech Translator

Machine Translation

  • Human Interface

Language and MT tools that can help users access content in their preferred languages

Real-time speech translator

 

More than 20% of the population not covered by commercial translation tech.

Home - Metaphysic.ai

 

 

 

Digital Avatars and Virtual Assistants

Image Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (STT) and TTS

  • Spatial Computing

Hyperreal identities for the Metaverse

Accentuating experience on the Meta, games, creation of NFTs

Home - Metaphysic.ai

AI-generated content

Deep Fakes, Deep Learning

  • Creator Economy

Content creation

Hyper-realistic synthetic content

IBM Logo Transparent PNG, IBM Emblem Free Download - Free Transparent PNG  Logos

Tracking un-authorized use of IP

Image Recognition, Computer Vision

  • Decentralization

AI-powered IP-violations on the Metaverse can be identified and isolated

To safeguard and protect intellectual property and to enforce the law

A picture containing text, clock

Description automatically generated

Digital Twin – Siemens EDA + PLM

Real-time analytics enabled by IoT sensors and Point Clouds

  • Spatial Computing
  • Experience

Simulations, predictive maintenance models

Training physical robots using trained models

Logo

Description automatically generated

AI Research SuperCluster

Supercomputer for AI Research

  • Infrastructure

To be able to learn from very large volumes for data – text, images and videos

Will contain ~16,000 GPUs, will be able to train AI systems with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte

 

The application of Artificial Intelligence in the Metaverse is evolving. In the next set of articles, we would try to quantify some of the benefits that AI brings to users and communities. 

For questions and feedback, please email me at bandev@nasscom.in


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Bandev Ghosh
Senior Manager

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