XR company Bizzlogic announced on Tuesday it had fully launched its Meadow enterprise metaverse platform.
The turnkey, flagship metaverse-as-a-service platform offers users virtual spaces for working, collaborating, and connecting.
With its intuitive, easy-to-use, and flexible functionality, enterprises, organisations, and others can boost engagement among their teams as well as customer bases.
The comprehensive platform allows users to collaborate virtually with bespoke settings, allowing virtual attendees to build connections with people around the world.
https://youtu.be/E35ohxHVarw?si=IS6YvOChG-fCPUgF
The technology also offers profound insights into user behaviour—a useful tool to empower team leaders and administrators.
The Hamburg, Germany-based firm initially revealed the service in 2020 with the aim of building “meaningful” collaborations with a modular platform. In its current iteration, developers can use this format to create an interoperable metaverse where businesses can “drive deeper engagement.”
Multiple companies have used the Meadow enterprise metaverse for events, including Sony, Proctor & Gamble (P&G), Siemens, BMW, Carrefour, SAP, and many others. These have served as virtual meeting grounds for workspaces, online events, trade shows, eCommerce showcases, and educational spaces.
Meadow Cites Surveys ‘In the Field’
The announcement comes as research finds that immersive technologies will add $5 trillion USD to global markets by 2030. Despite this, numerous challenges are leading to barriers to adoption for many enterprises.
Businesses currently struggle with interoperability among enterprise solutions and learning their long-term value.
Without a solid level of interoperability and connectivity, allowing programmes to import and export assets, work across devices, and avoid proprietary functionality, many companies are left scratching their heads on how to develop their strategies for a metaverse-enabled future.
This is despite metaverse adoption rising among enterprise users and a growing number of use cases developing across verticals.
Bizzlogic also cited additional Gartner research, showing that roughly one-third of US adults had no idea what the Metaverse was or how to use it. Contrarily, more than half of users stated they wanted to join the Metaverse.
Meadow and the Benefits of Enterprise Metaverses
According to the company, the Meadow metaverse offers three key features:
Accessibility with a user-friendly and intuitive interface, the platform can accommodate standard WiFi and does not need additional kit. This facilitates immersive experiences that are interoperable, cheap, and with fewer barriers to entry, which teams can set up in a matter of minutes.
Sustainability, where people on the Meadow enterprise metaverse can partner to reduce carbon footprints and meet sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is the result of meeting virtually rather than travelling by plane, car, or otherwise, leading to measurable benefits for the environment.
Finally, Meadow taps Creativity with Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) to deliver stellar photorealistic environments, visuals, and real-time 3D (RT3D) assets.
Pascal Kuemper, Chief Executive, Meadow, said in a statement,
“Today’s technological advancements, in many ways, erode the connective tissue between human beings. Meadow’s mission is to reinvent the quality, frequency, and depth of global human engagement. We’re creating a space that is safe, collaborative, and results in long-term influence. Our goal is to expand the limits of physical experience through convenient and affordable immersive technology.”
The Shift to ‘Always-On’ Access
Speaking with Fabio Buccheri, Head Of Business Development, Bizzlogic, XR Today learned that launching Meadow was “akin to embarking on an odyssey” through virtual reality and digital engagement.
Explaining in further detail, Buccheri said,
“One of the most complex aspects was reengineering our voice communication system. Our initial framework was based on a peer-to-peer system. However, the limitations in scalability and quality became quickly apparent. Our pivot was a strategic partnership with TeamSpeak, and the journey involved jointly developing a cutting-edge Metaverse voice system that revolutionizes the concept of digital communication”
Additional questions about the company’s business model involved transitioning “from an event-based platform to a permanent, living Metaverse.” This required transparency over pricing and cloud system storage flexibility.
The adjustments were “not just business decisions” but “ethical choices” aligning with the company’s mission to “democratize access to the Metaverse.”
When asked about the functionality of the platform as a persistent, always-on metaverse, he explained it would not be blockchain-based. Instead, each company requests Bizzlogic to build its own campuses, which they could “deploy internally and their employees can just log in whenever they want.”
“Persistency is a crucial aspect of it,” he explained.
Meadow to Build Worlds in Real-Time
Further in the discussion, we explored the possibility of adding bespoke virtual and real-time 3D (RT3D) assets on the platform. Explaining the process, Buccheri said that, according to his company’s vision, it would move from its current agency-style environment business model to developing generative AI-based worlds.
“Our goal and aim is to have something in the end which fosters this kind of user-generated content,” he explained.
Initially, Bizzlogic understood that not all clients could “pay for custom environments from the get-go,” leading to the company developing several template environments to “foster this accessibility on the platform.”
This would later result in implementing a content management system (CMS), where clients could access such environments, both bespoke and template, on the backend of the platform.
He explained further,
“This means that [you] can fill it up [the environment] with all sorts of media material from within the CMS and therefore, start and customise it. We’re adding more and more parameters to change in the CMS with every development that we release”
Additional objects could include sliders for changing wall colours, adding logos, photos, and digital assets, and others. A future developmental feature would include a 3D asset upload to place objects in the environment.
“We’re currently working on developing a showroom that has the digital objects CMS already embedded in the functionally, where you can go into the backend to upload additional 3D assets. It will be separate from the primary CMS.”
Despite functioning as a “middleman” for clients, Bizzlogic manages the system with its baseline repository project and avatar systems developed in UE5. The company also aims to automate the process of building, developing, and deploying UE5 environments in the near future.
Meadow and the Future of Generative AI
Finally, when speaking on future generative AI features, Buccheri explained that the company’s research and development (R&D) pipeline included potential AI-based systems to arrange environments, objects, tables, and other assets.
With it, users could add stages, meeting tables, networking areas, and other parameters using machine learning (ML) algorithms. Developers could also randomise their placement across the immersive world.
He said,
“This is an initial step that already incorporates some AI thinking and processes in there in the future. It would be a dream to have a type bar where clients could prompt ‘magical forest’ […] this is something we look forward to”
Regarding Bizzlogic’s avatar project, the company wanted to tackle using AI-powered brand ambassadors for business-to-business spaces, “especially for eCommerce purposes,” he said.
“We’re tackling this whole future of work topic, and I think there’s been a lot of talks of companies already building their own large language models (LLMs) as an internal kind of Wiki replacement. I think the same concept can be applied to your Metaverse campus. Imagine you have like an AI character walking around in there. You can ask them questions, and they can always answer me according to the input it receives.”
For more information, kindly visit https://www.bizzlogic.com/.
