Together with Finncham & Immersal, we were happy to invite our attendees to the webinar “Metaverse Beyond the Hype: Unleashing the Potential of Augmented Reality”.
The moderator welcomed our first speaker of the event, Matias Koski. He is the GM at the global sales department of Immersal, a Finnish high tech company. Immersal allows developers to merge and “anchor” digital content to real-world objects – with precise accuracy to their actual location in the physical space. Matias explained that Metaverse focusses on connecting people online. It’s a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users. The metaverse is basically a representation of an immersive 3D virtual world where users can interact with different spaces as their digital avatars. Just like the real world, the metaverse can allow users to move around different metaverse spaces as their digital avatars.
Why are XR and Metaverse so important? Gartner predicts 25% of people will spend at least one hour per day in Metaverse by 2026. HTC estimates that, within 10 years we will spend more of our walking time in the 3D world than we will in the physical world. And lastly, Singularity University predicts there will be new jobs that are created where individuals spend the majority if not all, of their time in the Metaverse.
The second speaker, Chung Ng, was welcomed by the moderator. He is SVP Technology, Strategy Developer at PCCW HK Telecom. He started by giving the attendees an insightful introduction to Augmented Reality (AR) -Metaverse and JKT InnoLab by showcasing AR case studies. AR is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. One of the most famous ones must be the enhanced version of Pokémon GO’s augmented reality feature in which Pokémon appear anchored to your real-world environment right in front of you through the screen of your mobile device.
The third speaker was Kelvin Cheng. He works for the R&D department as group manager with Rakuten Mobile, a Japanese e-commerce and online retail company based in Tokyo. During his presentation he mainly talked about how Rakuten Mobile took the stadium spectator experience to the next level with AR. The goal was to create a novel sport watching experience to increase fan engagement at the stadium. They used state-of-the-art technology that can take advantage of 5G. Thanks to AR technology, they used visual positioning with Immersal that added seats around the stadium as well as AR content on the field + around the stadium. All of this by using mobile phones or smart glasses.
He concluded his presentation by explaining how 5G helps augmented reality. With the commercial deployment of 5G, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) encompass a host of new use cases which, augmented by edge computing, it will bring great value to industries & enterprises.
This event ended with a very interesting Q&A and left the attendees intrigued by the whole concept. We hope to see more interesting events like this in the future!