The Metaverse for Business: XR, Web3 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Within the next decade, technology will enable a paradigm shift and unlock immense opportunities for everyone. The pursuit of innovative, efficient, and resilient solutions in the face of unprecedented challenges is compelling enterprises to embrace next-generation technologies, starting with extended realities and leading down the path to a holistic metaverse based on Web3.

 

These advances are ushering in new and creative ways to experience data and evolve insight. We can use extended realities to share, discover and communicate within a team; it is an intuitive way to bring engineering and design data to life. The metaverse offers an opportunity to engage with information in context, through verified and trusted sources. The pandemic has altered traditional working methods. The disruption has been most keenly observed in those industries that have typically relied on physical assets or in-person engagement to train employees and design, manufacture, market, sell, repair their products or services.

 

Industries now commonly experience design in context at any time during its creation and communicate effectively across functions worldwide. The increasing adoption of real-time data technologies is instrumental in accelerating the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Described as the convergence of emerging technology, 4IR includes advanced digital production technologies such as the industrial Internet of Things, human-machine interfaces, and artificial intelligence. All of this is happening against the wider backdrop of the growth of Web3, which is characterized as a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web where users control their own data and identity.

 

The promise of Web3 is that it allows access to data from anywhere, which poses challenges to industry around digital asset ownership and security. Essentially, Web3 enables the metaverse.