Guest Post by VRARA Italy Chapter President Lorenzo Montagna:
On Saturday morning I had the opportunity to participate in the live broadcast of Sky TG24 to talk about Metaverse: you can find attached an excerpt and the full version in the first comment!
I would like to reiterate that the Metaverse is not synonymous with video games, NFTs, virtual reality, but it is the concept of an evolved digital world where, thanks to WEB 3.0 technology, we enter the spaces to live new experiences, new content thanks to a pool of technologies including those mentioned above, as well as AR, cloud, MR and 5G.
the Metaverse is therefore evidently an evolution of the current relationship we have with screen-mediated technology: technology has in fact improved from the point of view of speed and ubiquity but remains always linked to increasingly smaller screens.
The Metaverse will therefore be a reappropriation of the "outside" world, of "space" as Apple says, with technology superimposed or even replacing the real one. For this reason, this complex ecosystem cannot be created by a single company and in a few months.
As far as artificial intelligence is concerned - as I say to Sky - I think we have reached a dangerous point of synonymy between artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence, which is certainly an impressive part for the possibilities of improving one's work, but which completely diverts attention to deeper issues concerning the role that technology itself will assume between now and the next few years.
What I have not been able to say for reasons of time is that the solutions to be able to use the metaverse and AI combined are really many and that they actually cover an entire so-called value chain: from promotion to communication, from customer relationship to employee training, to sales.
We see this very well as VR/AR Association (VRARA) with a steady growth of investments in VR and AR solutions, i.e. content rather than platforms.
In fact, the problem is that too often companies think of the metaverse as a tactical marketing solution to create simple product launches, perhaps on a young target, and do not realize instead that they have to create a "real" and new world where brand equity is maintained and where there is a very realistic representation of the company.
It is important to underline that in these days the European community is working both to accelerate the creation of a digital identity and for the digital currency: this testifies to the fact that the EEC is strongly committed to the issues of virtual worlds.
