For companies playing with virtual reality as disparate as aircraft manufacturer Boeing and online gaming platform Roblox, forays into the so-called “metaverse” have come with equal parts promise and peril.
The U.S. aviation giant is turning to digital technology to speed up production of new planes, Boeing chief information officer Susan Doniz said at the Reuters Momentum conference in Austin on Tuesday. She cited how Boeing cut the development time for the T-7 trainer aircraft by 80% to three years as an example of what might be possible for commercial aircraft.
Still, Doniz declined to offer a target date for Boeing to digitally design its next major plane, a goal the company has been discussing for years. Boeing has a commercial order book of 4,354 aircraft.
Some employees have also expressed reluctance about the tools offered by Boeing to help them. The company has deployed HoloLens, Microsoft’s mixed reality headsets, so staff can digitally wire planes with manuals in front of them. The first-generation glasses had issues with certain lighting conditions, and they were an adjustment for some, she said.
“There’s a bit of a learning curve,” she said.
Virtual reality is still in its infancy. The metaverse, not just a place where Boeing might one day build its planes, is a concept where people can have an avatar in vast virtual lands. There’s even talk of creating real-world “digital twins” — and the problems with it, said Roblox chief scientist Morgan McGuire.
“There’s a lot of stuff in the real world that’s really serious and really bad,” McGuire told the conference. “I don’t want the haves and the have-nots. I don’t want — what’s the digital equivalent of roaming?”
Roblox’s success, attracting nearly 60 million daily users to play and create games on its site, however, hasn’t found a match in Tinder, the Match Group-owned dating app that takes a wait-and-see approach to metaverse.
“We don’t do anything explicitly in the metaverse today, but we want to be the place you go when you want to meet someone new, whether in the real world or the virtual world,” Faye said. Iosotaluno, chief operating officer of Tinder. at the conference.
Part of the challenge may be that the technology is rudimentary. In the opinion of Renji Bijoy, chief executive of virtual desktop company Immersed, speaking at the Reuters conference on Wednesday, “it’s more (like) Windows 95,” he said.
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