Microsoft recently made waves with their announcement they would lay off most of their Hololens hardware team and their entire industrial metaverse team, which created enterprise metaverse projects for clients. The news might make you think that metaverse start-ups would cower away from enterprise technology. Miami-based Mytaverse, though, has a different response: Think again.
“In the early 2000s, people discounted web 2.0. Then it took over everything from shopping (Amazon) to socializing (Facebook),” says Mytaverse CEO Kenneth Landau. “Many companies missed out on these wins. The metaverse is already here, and it will only grow larger. And like web 2.0, the big growth area will be in enterprise.”
Landau would know. Of all the early entrants into the metaverse sector, Mytaverse is one of the leading enterprise players. Pepsico Latam, Zaha Hadid Architects, and other significant companies have hired the firm to create enterprise metaverse solutions to business problems. Mytaverse’s execs view themselves as the on-boarders for legacy companies’ entrances into the metaverse.
Recognizing that one headset or hardware won’t dominate the metaverse, the company has taken a hardware-agnostic approach. Users can log onto Mytaverse via their phone, computer, or other devices.
While some firms use the hardware-agnostic Mytaverse to create virtual sales trainings, others rely on their tech for sales demos. Take one private plane manufacturer, Dassault Aviation. It’s handed Mytaverse 3D digital files, which Mytaverse has then used to build beautiful, immersive environments and facilitate sales. The plane manufacturer has found incredible efficiencies in the metaverse; they now show potential buyers a virtual plane instead of flying the customers to a plane hangar in Germany, where sometimes they wouldn’t close a deal.
Mytaverse sees no correlation between its successful endeavor and Microsoft’s failure to launch because its business model differs from Microsoft’s industrial metaverse.
“The issue at Microsoft was that they were doing very intense 3D digital twins, which were essentially one-offs for clients,” explains Mytaverse CTO Jaime Lopez. “These were used essentially for training purposes, like getting an aircraft engineer up to speed on a new product or using X Ray vision. Many clients have developed these in-house.”
Enterprise clients are running to Mytaverse because it delivers incredible results. On the visual side, Lopez has leveraged artificial intelligence to create more layered clothing. Instead of spending hours toiling on a design, the company uses AI to take them from the start to the end of a design. The result is avatars that move and look like real humans.
You won’t find any of Mark Zuckerberg’s limbless avatars in Mytaverse. Unlike Meta, Mytaverse recognizes that the metaverse, especially the enterprise metaverse, will exist across multiple services. They’ve partnered with Ready Player Me, which creates avatars that users can use across different platforms, so Mytaverse’s avatars can be used in multiple metaverse settings.
“With hundreds of different outfits, wardrobe selections, and accessories, our users can be as unique as they want,” Lopez says in a press release announcing the partnership. “The highly optimized avatars from Ready Player Me play a crucial role in keeping the number of concurrent users beyond any other multiplayer environment with one single game server. The combination between high-quality graphics and high performance is the perfect recipe for our Metaverse enterprise solution.”
Since the avatars can travel across platforms, it makes Mytaverse even more appealing to enterprise customers. Of course, enterprise customers care about more than just visuals. They want all their senses to be activated in artificial spaces. Many people forget the sound, but not Lopez. Before Mytaverse, he worked in the recording industry, creating virtual projections for Tiesto, Madonna, and other top music acts. He prioritizes stellar visuals and sounds, so he has integrated Dolby.io’s audio technology into Mytaverse.
Everyone knows Dolby for their surround sound, and when you’re in Mytaverse, you are immersed in the sounds. As Lopez puts it, “We want to take you somewhere you haven’t been before. It isn’t virtual. It isn’t reality. It’s something better, a synthesis of reality and virtual. It’s the metaverse. And it will change how we understand and interact with everything.”
Given the number of companies signing up to use Mytaverse’s enterprise technology, more and more avatars will be immersed in Mytaverse’s virtual environment soon.
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