Augmented World Expo Europe 2023 showcases latest metaverse applications

Augmented World Expo Europe in Vienna is the sister to the June AWE USA event, marking its 14th year bringing together AR, VR, MR and XR (augmented, virtual, mixed and extended reality); spatial and metaverse companies; developers; content creators; and users of these technologies. It should be noted that the lines between these technology acronyms and phrases are blurred, and in many ways, this is all part of the wider evolution of our digital interactions.

The event included multiple half-day tracks across two days, exploring subjects such as education, retail, development and content creation, gaming and media, healthcare, education, standards, and AI virtual beings. The consistent track that dominated both days was a full enterprise and industrial focus on metaverse applications, from employee collaboration to factory digital twin operation, from companies such as Siemens AG, Nokia Oyj, Bayer AG, Lenovo Group Ltd., Swisscom AG, Liberty, Meta Platforms Inc. and HTC Corp.

Opening keynote

In the opening keynote address, AWE co-founder Ori Inbar described the breadth of attendees at the event, with participants from 58 countries, and referred to the 125 exhibitors in the expo hall and a total of 101 startups at the event. He referenced the US event, where his keynote featured a ChatGPT-written section and went on to acknowledge that the XR/metaverse industry might appear to be in the shadow of AI. He went on to point out that the range of available consumer devices, such as the Meta Quest 3 and the upcoming Apple Vision Pro, makes the next few months very much about mixed-reality hardware and the experiences and content for those: "After all, no one wants ChatGPT as a present under their Christmas tree." Inbar also added that AI was good for the metaverse/XR industry in general as a relevant user interface for the content being created.

Meta for work

In a mainstage presentation, Meta described the impact of mixed reality on the way people work, and how it will continue to evolve. The company was keen to point out that mixed reality is being used today, but that is often overlooked because general awareness of these technologies is with their use in games and media. It was suggested that many of the key communication technologies, such as mobile and smartphones, gained mass adoption due to the take-up in enterprise proving the practical worth of the technology. Meta cited use cases for enterprise MR such as learning and training, creativity and design, meetings and collaboration, and building company community. Operational digital twins for factory and plant installations were also mentioned. This expanded into a use case with Pfizer Inc. from the pandemic and the deployment of 500 Quest headsets to train new operators of COVID-19 vaccine facilities. This included a 100-page training manual being adapted into a VR training guide. Pfizer's internal data was presented, suggesting 40%-60% time savings in using VR training over existing approaches, saving $23,000 per trainee, with 87% of its workforce preferring the VR-based training on sterile injectable manufacturing over traditional methods.

Switching to a more consumer-focused example, the company showed Deutsche Lufthansa AG creating a VR experience for its new first-class cabin seat in order to allow clients to experience it. Previous approaches involved a large physical version of the seating being transported and erected at conferences and events. It managed to get 10,000 people to experience the seating in six months at 10% of the cost of its physical installation and transportation.

Meta continued with a discussion of its partner ecosystem in the software space across the main use-case categories it had cited. Companies such as Talespin, Adobe Inc., Autodesk Inc., Microsoft Corp., Glue, Arthur and Mesmerize were among the 25 shown, of the over 900 independent software vendors in its ecosystem. Microsoft Mesh was highlighted as being in preview along with Zoom in Meta Horizon Workrooms currently available. Other partnerships highlighted were with Accenture PLC, Deloitte and PwC as global systems integrators.

Mentioned both at Meta Connect and this event was Meta Quest for Business, as a package from the company to help manage and deploy devices and software in an enterprise-friendly and efficient way.

Siemens digital twins for sustainable manufacture

As both a large manufacturer and a provider of industrial equipment to others, and with 300,000 employees and $77 billion in revenue in 2022, Siemens described its use of industrial metaverse approaches, such as digital twins in its processes to drive more sustainable manufacturing. World Economic Forum (WEF) figures showed that the manufacturing industry contributes 30% of the world's CO₂ and the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows the industry consumes 38% of global energy.

Siemens' key message is the fusion of the real (physical) and digital world in a virtuous circle. As an introduction, the company highlighted customers such as Unlimited Tomorrow, which uses Siemens NX modeling to create custom prosthetic limbs; beverage company Wolf of the Willow, which adapted to a changing market because bars were not open to serve its kegs and so created cans instead; and UMO, which makes custom 3D printed eyewear, able to use locally sourced raw materials in its factory in Munich.

Siemens went on to describe its own manufacturing facilities and the capturing of internet of things data in them that enable it to gain accurate real-time information about the processing. It cited that a typical plant generates about 2,200 terabytes of data a month (equivalent to the data size of about 500,000 streaming movies). In its approach to a truly digital enterprise, it combines physical and digital, starting with digital design, moving to physical operations, but with a digital twin created from the design in parallel. This offers the option to continually optimize and simulate change. It aims to have both digital twins of the production facilities and of the products themselves for a more unified and deep understanding of the entire process. It demonstrated this with a motion control factory that it planned as a digital twin before building it, allowing it to optimize the production process in simulation first. It cited a 20% increase in productivity and 2,900 tons less CO2 per year through this approach.

Other examples were with Volkswagen AG in partnership with NVIDIA Corp. (using Omniverse) to link automation equipment with the industrial cloud. It also described a Lisbon, Portugal-based project, Nemo's Garden, that is implementing underwater farming with an aqua biosphere for a more consistent crop and yield to make pesto. Much of the management of the facility is through its digital twin, including VR applications, to remove the need for constant human divers to maintain the facility. As well as using zero arable land and no pesticides, the facility is producing a crop with 30% enhanced micronutrient density. Other examples include The Coca-Cola Co., Bye Aerospace and a European lithium-ion battery factory with Northvolt that is a (WEF) lighthouse reference project.

Lenovo — and enterprise-first strategy for XR

In this presentation, it was again stated that much of the technology that consumers now regularly use, such as mobile phones, smartphones and tablets, was first adopted in the enterprise. It was there that robust use for business hardened the product sets and showed more people their potential. Lenovo stated that enterprises make decisions based on the return on investment, and that XR has many metrics to show impact across a company. These range from the efficiency of removing some of the need to travel, the retention of information people see in VR training and the enhanced collaboration opportunities in hybrid office work, the ability to enhance field servicing skills with AR tooling, and the wider operation of industrial facilities with digital twins.

The company's headsets and software services are packaged for enterprises, and it is not a consumer-available brand. Lenovo operates across the entire stack, from content creation to content delivery. In the delivery layer, it facilitates enterprise-scale management of devices and data, and it engages with partners such as NVIDIA Omniverse. Among its product portfolio is the ThinkReality VRX all-in-one headset, which is both a VR and an MR device (offering full color pass-through). This device also has full mobile data management (MDM) support, which is key for enterprise deployments to have zero-touch commissioning and security. Lenovo's ThinkReality cloud platform is its own MDM platform, for clients that do not have other MDM support such as Microsoft InTune or VMware Inc. Lenovo partners with QUALCOMM Inc., using the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform as an open approach for its ISVs for developing applications. Lenovo XR devices also sit within its wider Integrated Solution Support Offering. It is a partner with Wipro and Tata Elxsi Ltd. for professional XR service deployment too.

The presentation finished by describing the challenge customers have in trying to understand when the right time is to engage with XR due to the constant evolution and churn of devices and approaches. Lenovo TruScale is its device-as-a-service approach for enterprises; with this pay-as-you-go, refresh-as-needed type of financing for its solutions, it removes the barrier-to-entry concerns for a company unsure of when to start with an enterprise or industrial metaverse strategy, and eliminates lock-in concerns because an exit or upgrade is always possible.

Across other enterprise presentations

Virtual world platform Arthur and one of its clients, Bayer AG, described the use by the global pharmaceutical company to understand and configure its physical offices and provide virtual collaboration spaces for hybrid working, specifically targeting maintaining company social cohesion and culture. This project has been done at a global level to ensure that many cultural sensitivities and practices were taken into account. Bayer gave figures about its use of VR/XR with 317 onboarded employees, with a total duration of 150 days in VR with an average session lasting 106 minutes. Bayer said that 82% of the participants are hopeful that digital twins will support them to maintain the Bayer company culture in a hybrid setting. We have explored some of these social implications and impacts of the metaverse on enterprises.

Pump manufacturer Grundfos described how it worked with SynergyXR to create 3D scans (visual digital twins) of its installations and how digital twins of proposed ones for clients were simplified to allow sales teams to use the technology, reducing travel and access challenges. It also enabled virtual engineering training and remote support for its own staff and for customers using shared VR.

Nokia and EY presented some results from a survey on the adoption of industrial and enterprise metaverse focused on automotive, industrial, supply chain and energy, which parallels much of the wider 451 Research metaverse survey results in indicating the overall adoption and expectation of a significant impact to the industry through industrial metaverse approaches. Nokia went on to describe the development of 6G communications targeted as below 10 ms latency use cases very much optimized for industrial IoT and for XR-style applications served from the edge. The plan is for it to be standardized by 2030, but South Korea plans a rollout earlier in 2028.

There were also separate presentations by IEEE on standards and the social implications of the metaverse and a deep dive by Virtual Dimension Center on many of the related global standards organizations and efforts that covered all things metaverse and XR.
The next report on AWE Europe will look at the startups pitching in the investment competition to give a sense of the depth and range of metaverse-related approaches in other sectors such as games, entertainment, education and AI.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
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