Guest speakers from leading companies and organizations in the industry addressed the COMPUTEX Forum on Tuesday afternoon, which was organized on the theme of “Metaverse—Surreal to Real.” The speakers gave presentations illustrating how the metaverse is being utilized to power digitalization, accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions, and host new modes of content creation.
Greg Estes, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Developer Programs at NVIDIA, opened the forum with a presentation that focussed upon the current drive towards digitalization in multiple industries and demonstrated how NVIDIA is enabling, supporting, and powering this transformation.
Estes illustrated the scope for enterprises situated in various fields and at vastly different scales to benefit from the possibilities opened up by the metaverse, from the level of product design and testing, to production and factory operations, all the way up to complex simulations of city environments, weather patterns, and even planetary and galactic mechanics.
From manufacturing and robotics to retail and healthcare, the realistic simulation of products, processes, and applications offered by a metaverse with true-to-life physics and environments will allow enterprises to rapidly design, test, and optimize their products at a fraction of the cost before bringing them to the real world.
“This is going to require a new set of technologies,” Estes said, including data interoperability, accelerated computing, highly specialized skills, and generative AI, all of which NVIDIA is developing and making available to partners and companies through its Omniverse platform.
President and CEO of Siemens Taiwan Erdal Elver built on many of these ideas in a presentation that introduced Siemens Xcelerator, “an open business platform which helps assist customers to drive their digital transformations linked with their goals to become carbon neutral.”
Digitalization is interconnected with the goal of net zero carbon emissions, Elver said.
Whereas previous production models were process-driven and followed discrete, predefined steps, today’s models are powered by data and utilize interlinked processes which allow for flexible decision-making and continuous optimization.
Xcelerator uses the concept of digital twins to simulate products with the aim of optimizing their carbon emissions and functionality, with one study showing that the platform could help save up to 7.5 gigatons of CO2 over the next ten years.
Alice Chang, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), concluded the forum with a presentation on “Innovations & Opportunities for Content Industries in Metaverse.”
Chang explained that the metaverse will need content to generate economic value, and detailed how the technology is being used by Taiwanese creatives in music, film, virtual reality, fashion, and art.
Metaverse ecosystems are already forming, with an alliance of content creators now officially established, but the full integration of content and technology industries remains a challenge for the future, Chang said.
