Industry Technologies
By Dipl.-Ing. Yvonne Heinen-Foudeh, Senior Int'l. CorrespondentWith the third part of the series on AI-based applications, we pick up on the mega-trend Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg announced to invest approximately $10 billion into his concept for a merger between shopping and gaming. Other providers are following the lead of the modern pioneer.
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The elusive world of augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality makes use of artificial intelligence methods. Options for the distant future? Not at all.
Several luxury fashion brands are partnering up with gaming platforms. Louis Vuitton has partnered with League of Legends, and Balenciaga is partnering up with Fortnite. In August 2021, Burberry created a lot of noise promoting digital ownership and gaming with its Blankos Block Party, and the brand dropped an NFT* collection in partnership with Mythical games.
The abbreviation NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token (cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other). Simply speaking, NFTs represent the currency in the World of Extended Reality.
Adidas is already present in the Metaverse. The "Into the Metaverse" collection grants buyers access to an exclusive fan club.
The Adidas CONFIRMED app provides an up-to-date overview of the respective product offerings, the “hype drops”. Nike follows the call of virtual worlds. New Balance just recently announced it is joining its competitors Nike and Adidas in the Metaverse with three pending trademark applications.
Ralph Lauren and Prada are also flirting with the platform of the US tech company formerly known as Facebook. The Italian luxury brand connects thereby straight with the Sportswear giant from Herzogenaurach, Germany. https://www.adidas.com/prada-nft
Combining physical and virtual reality
Simply stated, extended XR-worlds are 3-D simulations whose design depends entirely on the users. They are the ones who design buildings and stores and create outfits for their avatars who populate the virtual world. They, in turn, act directly or via marketplaces.
Microsoft and Nvidia are working on their own versions of the metaverse. The idea is neither new nor comes from Mark Zuckerberg, but from Philip Rosedale. With his company Linden Lab, he created the virtual world "Second Life" in 2003. Just as NFTs serve as a means of payment in the Metaverse, Rosedale uses the Linden Dollar (recent exchange rate: 1US$ = 320 Linden$).
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The adidas CONFIRMED app QR code
While modern AR tools and technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFT, and virtual reality goggles, more and more of the super-computing capacity required for such simulation scale are in the making - the challenges are likely to lie elsewhere.
Who do we suppose controls our new parallel world and how? – As we learned even massive abuse via Facebook, various messenger services, and platforms cannot be kept in check. The mother of all artificial worlds can sing a song about this: When virtual banks with dubious offers and other dark machinations increased the risk of destabilizing the real economy, Linden Lab pulled the plug. Second Life, however, is alive and in the current hype about virtual worlds, one is reckoning with the best chances thanks to its experience advantage.
The plan behind all of that, "Extended Reality" – the combination of augmented, virtual and mixed reality – is set to become a key medium for social and business engagement. And yes, XR is considered to be an enabler as well of complex, fully integrated Industry 4.0 applications when it comes to all kinds of simulations with a major impact on automated decision-making processes — a whole new scenario to monetizing online worlds and organizing a digital economy shaped by user content.
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The world's most powerful supercomputer in a ranking of 55 top installations using ultra-fast processors in the ongoing race for the top position: The Japanese "Fugaku", developed by Fujitsu and the Rinken Institute in Kobe, achieves a computing power of around 442,010 TeraFLOPS, can process multiple data formats simultaneously and is therefore used particularly in AI research.