Immerse Global Summit (IGS) 2023 saw a successful first day, with many leading brands filling the Dr. Pillips Center, its exhibition hall and atriums. Moreover, the day ended with a city-wide immersive scavenger hunt that pushed IGS attendees to explore the downtown Orlando area – in a collaborative effort with event partners MetaCenter and Synapse to showcase the local area.
For those still awake following the late-night scavenger hunt, Meta’s Global Executive of Engagement, Reality Labs, Dan Nieves, took the stage on Wednesday morning to inform IGS 2023 attendees with the latest Meta updates, including deep considerations for business and productivity.
Nieves explained:
Metaverse technologies and AI are really reshaping how we experience the physical and digital worlds. If we think about obviously this moment right here, all of us in the same room, being together in the physical world will always be the richest way. – But more and more, people in teams are being distributed and more spread out. So, it’s really the combination of both the physical and digital worlds that are defining our reality.
Meta Quest for Business is Coming Soon
Moreover, Dan Nieves noted how businesses today are “already using” technologies such as VR and MR to “create new opportunities that benefit our society.” Nieves further explained how a “wide range” of XR for enterprise use cases already exists for clients representing education, healthcare, and workplace collaboration – “we are seeing a number of organisations see real impact today,” Nieves remarked.
During the opening keynote, the Global Executive of Engagement showcased how professionals are leveraging Meta’s immersive workplace product portfolio to complete complex tasks such as eye surgery, upskilling careers, engine maintenance, and helping athletes come back from injury.
During the opening Wednesday keynote, Nieves highlighted how Meta Quest for Business is coming “very soon.”
Nieves explained:
Very soon, we’re going to be launching Meta Quest for Business, which will bring together a solution around user management, app management, device management, which we see as a huge opportunity to help businesses and organisations who are looking to open up new ways of working.
Emerging Technologies Side-by-Side Will Push Human Connection Forward
Dan Nieves explained how Meta “firmly” believes that immersive technology is “the future” of human connection.
Moreover, Nieves added that other emerging technologies, such as AI and the cloud, will come together to become greater than the sum of their parts and “work together to help build the future of human connection, and one very focused on around the human experience.”
Nieves went on to explain how, alongside related emerging technology, new hardware with improved form factor – notably the firm’s recently released Ray Ban smart glasses – lowers the barrier to entry and helps to “democratise how people connect and interact with new information.”
“We talk often about this concept of social presence,” remarked Nieves. According to the Meta spokesperson, a “key part” of the Metaverse’s success relies on the feeling of human-to-human connectivity and matching real-life interaction as closely as possible – “how do we recreate that sense of presence so that it can feel like we’re all together.”
Nieves said:
The phone has been an incredible way for how we stay connected. But too often, we rely on screens to tap into virtual worlds or other content. It pulls us away from the moment that we’re in and the people that we’re physically with. So, we see this barrier dissolving over time, especially with the rise of mixed reality and, ultimately, augmented reality, where the technology starts to fade right into the background, and that allows us to simply enhance the world around us and stay more present in the moment that we’re in.
AR/VR/MR helps to power a deeper level of connection and sense of presence, notes Nieves. At IGS 2023, the event’s halls see a trove of XR vendors and end-users all pushing together to achieve a shared goal of immersive connectivity. While forecasts of when XR will become a day-to-day commonality vary greatly per person; the community’s shared goals and outreach could push the industry in the right direction.
