Analyst: The future of the metaverse is in manufacturing, planning, engineering

• Metaverse use cases have to be commercialized sooner
• With the market getting tougher, technology companies are pulling back
• Metaverse should be about “how to build a safer automobile and test it with less physical waste, cost, and time” 

Daniel Newman of Futurum Research discusses how we will be able to use the metaverse in the healthcare, automobile, and other industries on Squawk Box, CNBC. 

Metaverse is getting on a consumer level

Metaverse companies flocked to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2023, which shows the metaverse is getting on the consumer level. Use cases have to be commercialized sooner.

With the market getting tougher, technology companies are pulling back, says Newman. They’re looking to invest in R&D, in technologies that people can commercialize and monetize.

Meta was “too ambitious” 

He gave Meta as an example of a company that was too ambitious about what the future of the metaverse might look like. There was an excessive focus on consumer applications, wearing the big headsets, the virtual universe…how much of the market is going to get into that right away?

Building worlds in the future 

After expressing this doubt, Daniel Newman talked about what Nvidia is doing – using generative AI to actually build worlds in the future, where you can see what a building will look like in a space or design the inside of an office, or what Microsoft is doing with Teams to create a more collaborative meeting experience. He said:

When we go back to real world meetings, we see that connections and relationships are different than what we did on Zoom, so maybe the metaverse can bring us there. 

A wasted opportunity? 

The host asked if this was becoming an entirely wasted opportunity. He asked Newman: 

I don’t see applications for education, healthcare, for housing (that you touched upon). Don’t these developers have to move beyond gaming? 

Newman responded: 

The real applications of this are going to be manufacturing, planning, engineering. It’s going to be in health care, in exploring car tech and creating safer settings in public. It’s not about the big headsets and wearables; that’s only part of it. It’s about how to build a safer automobile and test it with less physical waste, cost, and time. The metaverse should be talking more about how to 3D print a valve, transplant it in a patient’s heart, and have the surgeon test it thousands of times. Of course, those commercial use cases don’t usually make it in the media.