Examples of the Metaverse infiltrating our lives

Author: Chenglin Pua

Original Title: "What Activities Are Already Taking Place in the Metaverse?"

Editors: Yu Baicheng, Wang Jilongyan

The metaverse gained tremendous attention in 2021, with many large companies starting to "paint a picture" for investors. For example, Meta's "All In" strategy; Nvidia's infrastructure layout for the metaverse; Tencent's buying spree strategy in the metaverse, and so on. Giants both domestically and internationally have relevant layouts. However, what specific scenarios are currently being used in daily life within the metaverse? Is the metaverse really just a concept?

Metaverse Weddings

On December 9, 2021, an American couple (Traci and Dave Gagnon) held a metaverse wedding, costing about $30,000 (approximately 200,000 RMB).

In the metaverse, whether in Vienna, Bali, or a British castle; flowers, dresses, music, and any other elements they wanted to add could be realized. Before the wedding, they released a short video invitation, introducing their wedding called the "MetaVerse Wedding Of The Century."

Metaverse Wedding

The wedding was held on the Virbela virtual platform. Virbela is a company focused on providing virtual environments for work, learning, and events.

At the wedding, Traci walked slowly up the stage holding hands with her bridesmaid, followed by Dave Gagnon taking Traci's hand. Then two 7-year-old flower girls approached the couple; one holding a ring, and the other carrying a flower basket. They then exchanged rings to complete the ceremony.

Some people believe that getting married in the metaverse is meaningless, while others find it meaningful. Whether a metaverse wedding holds significance for the newlyweds is likely a matter of personal opinion. However, it is undeniable that our current lives are gradually becoming virtualized. In the metaverse, newlyweds do not need to consider various objective or subjective factors. Additionally, the metaverse allows for the inclusion of dreamlike elements or scenarios that cannot be realized in the real world (such as holding a wedding in space, etc.). Finally, metaverse weddings can help us save resources in the physical world.

Buying Land in the Metaverse

On November 25, 2021, a 4.87 square meter digital land was sold for $2.43 million (approximately 15.52 million RMB) on the virtual world platform Decentraland.

Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform driven by the Ethereum blockchain, where users can socialize, play games, and trade. Decentraland is also a virtual city with many virtual lands where users can create anything and build their own virtual spaces, such as stores, offices, exhibition booths, etc.

Previously, the highest transaction record on the platform was $913,000 (approximately 5.81 million RMB). What is astonishing is that the price of Decentraland land has actually surpassed the average price of a single unit in Manhattan, New York, and is even far higher than the prices in other U.S. administrative regions and San Francisco.

The land buyer is the digital asset investment group Tokens.com. The sold land is located in the Fashion Street Estate, and the buyer Tokens.com stated that they will use this land to expand the digital fashion industry.

Famous Chinese singer JJ Lin also spent $123,000 (approximately 783,000 RMB) to buy three houses in Decentraland. JJ Lin even specified the exact location of his purchased houses on his official Twitter. The images in the tweet show his virtual houses.

JJ Lin's Twitter

*JJ Lin's land purchase record, * Source: Decentraland

In fact, Decentraland can be imagined as a new continent. As more users join Decentraland, various activities will take place here, thereby increasing demand and foot traffic. Similar to the real world, the closer to the city center, the more resources there will be, and correspondingly, land prices will rise.

Decentraland Map (blue markers indicate land for sale), Source: Decentraland

From the above image, the purple areas are undeveloped regions, while the green squares are near the corresponding city center.

There are a total of 90,000 parcels of land in Decentraland.

From JJ Lin's Twitter information, it can be seen that the three parcels he purchased are actually located near the city center.

JJ Lin's Decentraland Page, Source: Decentraland

In Decentraland, you can build whatever you want on the land. It can be a store, a house, or other assets. In fact, JJ Lin could create an exhibition hall on his land to showcase his music or other works, allowing every passerby to see his creations. Alternatively, he could build a concert stage on the land, where passersby could listen to his concert, and even charge for entry to his online concert.

In addition to selling land, Decentraland also sells items. Since items in Decentraland are unique once created, they have trading value and space.

Items for sale in Decentraland

Metaverse Education

On May 16, 2020, Mark Fisher, the Vice Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, spoke at a virtual graduation ceremony: "Congratulations to our graduating students from around the world; you make Berkeley better!" To celebrate the new graduates, this metaverse graduation ceremony recreated over 100 buildings of the school, including the school's stadium and small shops.

The internationally renowned Stanford University has recently launched a metaverse course, adapting to the development of the times. The course number is COMM166/266. In this course, students can wear VR headsets and attend classes remotely from their dorms or anywhere in the world. At its peak, up to 300 students appeared in the same virtual classroom at the same time.

This course may be the world's first course conducted entirely in VR. Stanford communication professor Jeremy Bailenson stated that in this course, students are not just casually playing with VR. In fact, VR will be the cornerstone of our class. No one has ever organized hundreds of students to wear VR headsets together for months, exploring virtual spaces. According to Professor Jeremy Bailenson, such a thing has never happened in the history of virtual reality in education. In other schools, there might be a class with ten people using VR together. But in this class, the scale will reach hundreds, with over half of the time spent in VR. In this class, we will break through the scale boundaries of VR experiences.

Professor Jeremy Bailenson

Professor Jeremy Bailenson is also the founder and director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

In this class, students' learning locations could be a virtual museum, more everyday scenes, or the least visited corners of the Earth, such as volcanic craters and underwater reefs.

Virtual Museum

Professor Jeremy Bailenson has stated that the longer-term goal of this course is to familiarize students with VR as quickly and deeply as possible, as it has established itself as one of the core technologies of the metaverse and will become a key communication tool and medium in the future metaverse era. In Professor Jeremy Bailenson's view, for VR technology, today may also be a critical turning point for the direction of technology in the coming decades. At this critical moment, allowing Stanford students to understand, familiarize themselves with, and master VR technology will enable them to continue the path of innovation in Silicon Valley and use VR technology to promote technological advancement.

It seems that metaverse education is thriving and has already produced practical examples. However, metaverse education still faces challenges. First, many projects that claim to be educational metaverses are actually just applying VR educational scenarios and are not true metaverse education. For example, how the real world and the metaverse interact and how to project the value of the metaverse into the real world are major issues. Secondly, when every student is a creator, how to build and maintain a healthy metaverse education ecosystem, similar to how offline schools have their own ecosystems (such as stores, copy shops, etc.), is a challenge that metaverse education needs to overcome.

However, metaverse education also has its advantages. For example, advanced technological equipment can simulate realistic teaching environments, such as the Amazon rainforest, allowing students to have better and deeper experiences. Or students can visit the most dangerous and beautiful places in the world without leaving home, whether it's the bottom of the Mariana Trench or the peak of Mount Everest, whether it's the scorching Sahara Desert or the icy Antarctic, whether it's a bustling city or the vastness of space. As long as there is advanced technology, it can deceive the brain and all human senses, bringing people into a virtual world that is more real than reality.

Additionally, biology lab classes no longer need to take the lives of experimental animals, history classes can allow children to participate in historical events through technology, and students can simulate most physics and chemistry experiments in the virtual world.

Celebrating Christmas in the Metaverse

On December 22, 2021, Nvidia unveiled a winter wonderland created over 300 hours. This event was also a Christmas virtual world launched in collaboration with Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) to raise funds. The virtual world took up over 30 million blocks, covering nearly 160,000 square meters.

The map uses Nvidia's ray tracing technology to bring festive story elements to life, such as interactive Santa Claus, tasks, a Ferris wheel, and roller coasters.

In this virtual world, there is also a complete GOSH building. People can donate to GOSH hospital in this virtual world to bring a Christmas atmosphere to the children in the hospital. The funds raised will be used to develop advanced medical technologies, groundbreaking research programs for the treatment and cure of rare diseases, and support services for patients and families.

People can also explore a hedge maze, ride roller coasters, or just play with some penguins. Additionally, there is a Christmas market to stroll through.

Nvidia's Winter Wonderland

Although today's Christmas metaverse still seems rough, in the future, as Nvidia's interest in the metaverse grows, it will undoubtedly increase investment and research in metaverse-related projects, greatly enhancing the metaverse experience and related facilities. The future projects created by Nvidia in the metaverse are expected to see significant improvements and advancements; this may just be Nvidia's "test run."

Industrial Design and Experimentation in the Metaverse

Nvidia is leading the way in the industrial application of the metaverse. In October 2020, Nvidia launched the Omniverse beta, which has been tested by over 17,000 customers, including many companies such as BMW, Ericsson, Volvo, Adobe, and Epic Games that are participating in Omniverse collaboration. Omniverse is an open platform designed for virtual collaboration and real-time simulation with accurate physical properties, known as the engineer's metaverse. Engineers can simulate and create various things such as robots, cars, and factories within it. Users and teams can connect major design tools, resources, and projects in a shared virtual space for collaborative iteration, transforming the complex visualization workflows of creators, designers, and engineers.

BMW Group is the first automotive manufacturer to use Omniverse to design an end-to-end digital twin of an entire factory. Omniverse simulates a complete factory model, including employees, robots, buildings, and assembly parts, allowing thousands of product engineers, project managers, and lean experts in the global production network to collaborate in a virtual environment, completing a series of complex processes such as design, simulation, and optimization before real production of new products, reportedly improving efficiency by 30%.

BMW uses Omniverse to improve its production system, Source: BMW Group

Additionally, Volvo uses Omniverse for car design; Ericsson simulates 5G wireless networks through Omniverse; and the British architectural design firm Foster + Partners utilizes Omniverse for seamless collaboration among teams across 14 countries.

Foster + Partners is a legendary design and architecture firm that has designed Apple's headquarters and London's famous 30 St Mary Axe building (more commonly known as "The Gherkin"). Designers from 14 countries/regions around the world collaboratively create architecture in the shared virtual space of Omniverse.

The multinational network and telecommunications company Ericsson uses Omniverse to simulate 5G wave propagation in densely populated urban environments to minimize multipath interference. Infrastructure engineering software company Bentley Systems is using Omniverse to create a 4D infrastructure digital twin on the platform to simulate the structural assets of infrastructure and then monitor and optimize their performance throughout their lifecycle.

The Omniverse, which allows for real-time collaboration in the virtual world, is rapidly being applied on a large scale across various fields due to its efficiency and low cost, with the metaverse taking the lead in practical applications in the industrial sector driven by Omniverse.

In the past, most building designs were based on blueprints. With the Omniverse platform, it is now possible to create a high-precision three-dimensional design that is closer to reality in the virtual platform. After successful experimentation in the virtual world, all construction projects can be completed more quickly in the real world.

Volvo uses Omniverse for car design, Source: Nvidia

Ericsson uses Omniverse to simulate 5G wireless networks, Source: Ericsson

Nvidia is committed to creating the engineer's metaverse. We can see that the Omniverse platform has wide applications in many industries such as automotive, telecommunications, and construction. Nvidia's technology has also been adopted by many industry giants. All these industrial modeling require substantial computing power to execute. The Omniverse platform from Nvidia showcases its capabilities well.

Alibaba has also established a laboratory in the wave of the metaverse. In October 2021, Alibaba set up an XR laboratory in its DAMO Academy and gathered a team of experts including Li Honghua and Shi Jiadong. The XR laboratory is personally overseen by Tan Ping. Tan Ping is not only a leading expert in 3D modeling and holographic technology but also served as the deputy director of the 360 Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. His main focus is on three-dimensional modeling and holographic technology research and development.

The XR laboratory explores the application of the metaverse in agriculture and has practical application cases. The XR laboratory has developed an agricultural harvesting robot. By creating a three-dimensional model of the orchard and fruit trees, a complete virtual three-dimensional model of the orchard is built, allowing the robot to plan its movements in the virtual world to pick apples. According to the conference introduction, its advantages include significantly reducing some labor-intensive tasks in the orchard planting process and lowering management costs. Additionally, the robot can work not only during the day but also at night to harvest apples. In the process of developing the agricultural harvesting robot, the XR laboratory also built a set of agricultural service management platforms to collect and manage the robot's production data. Theoretically, this data can enter the virtual world and serve as a basis for the virtual world to understand the real world. The robot began trial operations in an apple base in Shaanxi in September this year.

The XR laboratory has also successfully developed an intelligent operation and maintenance robot for IDC data centers. This robot uses visual and tactile fusion algorithms for inspection, hard drive replacement, and asset inventory scenarios and has been tested in Alibaba Cloud data centers.