At Sulava, we look at metaverse primarily from the perspective of developing our customers’ work, work culture, competence, competitiveness and productivity. We see as much potential in the metaverse as it once was at the dawn of the Internet or in the cloud transition.

According to a McKinsey survey june 2022, 95% of executives interviewed believe the Metaverse will open up new business opportunities and bring significant positive effects.

Encounters take on a whole new dimension in the metaverse, be it a doctor’s virtual visit to a patient, a surgeon’s surgery on the other side of the world, remote training of flight captains, live building completion, a client event, or whatever. We have just scratched the surface of metaverse’s possibilities!

Here are some examples of how to benefit from metaverse:

  • Meetings and virtual encounters
  • Training and competence development
  • Information sharing and employee involvement
  • Business process development
  • Product development

Microsoft Mesh – customized virtual worlds

Mesh is Microsoft’s metaverse platform, which was created to take virtual communication and hybrid working to a completely new level. Mesh consists of three different areas, which together form a larger whole: avatars, immersive meetings and virtual 3D-worlds.

Mesh is designed to work on PC and Meta Quest VR devices and is built on the Microsoft 365 platform, so it is also a private and secure solution for business use.

Metaverse use cases

Metaverse provides possibilities that are only limited by imagination. There will be industry-specific solutions as well as ones that are customised with a specific customer in mind, but there are also generic use cases that Sulava has created to benefit companies regardless of their vertical. Get to know some use cases or contact us with your own needs!

The Executive Meeting Space in metaverse will enhance the participants’ meeting experience by making them feel like they are in the same fully immersive space. It will be customised according to your company’s brand and other requirements, and it will allow content sharing to be more engaging that in a Teams meeting, or even a regular face-to-face meeting.

Our vision of the Executive Meeting Space is Operations Room that can be created for different needs and purposes: Executive Board meetings, meeting with partners, project room, In-situation room for crisis management or for data driven decisions and leadership needs.

For example, for Executive Meeting space would have latest report dashboards, data, 3D objects, and documents available for board members, and ability to show videos and add interactive elements such as voting. Organizers would be able to invite right people to join them in the space and it is possible to facilitate the presentation with tools.

We also want to bring metaverse’s benefits in the face-to-face meeting lifecycle for the people who are visiting customers’ offices.

This pre-meeting experience can include:

  • Get to know the people who you are meeting in the form of holograms
  • Meeting agenda
  • Security, parking and building information: where and how to arrive, what to know in advance
  • Sharing meeting materials in advance for reading and commenting
  • Post-meeting follow-up

This metaverse solution enables onboarding new employees even before they start working.

When an employee has signed the contract, they are given access to new employees’ metaverse where they can learn about their new workplace and get to know about processes, buildings and layouts in 3D model – especially about those relevant to their work. New employee can watch videos and view other content in the right context that will reduce the real onboarding time. They can even meet other employees as avatars. This way they already feel familiar to the site from the day one.

We can also add speech to text, translation services and custom voice with text to speech that can be used to create a multi-lingual personal and people imitating bots that understand and speak on person’s language.

The great quality pre-onboarding experience makes new employees feel welcome, sense the spirit of the company and know that they have just started to work for a first-class employer.

The new shopping experience will allow the user to see their physical products in detail, seeing the colours, shapes, and sizes as in real life. This can also include videos and interactive content, making shopping not only easy but exciting. People can shop for both virtual and physical goods while in the experience.

This will bring even more value when shopping for holidays and other experiences. Hotels, resorts, and amusement parks digital twins show premises and offering as virtual experience in the metaverse, where people can move around, reserve tickets or rooms, buy goods, tag locations for their interest list and interact with games.

Customers can also engage with other visitors, holograms (static guides repeating information) or talk to interactive bots and actual people from sales or customer services who have been holoported to the metaverse.

Instead of using drivers vehicles can be operated remotely. These operators use haptic devices and controls such as haptic gloves and control replicas to bring in all required senses such as vision and touch. They can jump between vehicles quickly, reducing transit times needed during the switch. Lidar-scanning can feed operator information about vehicle’s surroundings.

In the future Artificial Intelligence (AI) can automate vehicle operations, and operator can be still used to monitor and take control in unexpected situations.

Remote assistance and maintenance work will benefit from Mixed Reality. This is already real life and routine via Dynamics Remote Assist and other RA providers. We will see the use of Mixed Reality and bringing unambiguous AI and computing to more scenarios where we need for more information at hand (documents, instructions, how-to instructions, schematics, designs and so on) and remote expertise to consult.

This will see lots of use cases scaling multiple industries – from factories to power plants, electric network to retail stores and medical use cases.

Using digital twins of sites, equipment and processes can be used to run simulations and plan & test new procedures, changes, and ways to operate to enhance effectiveness and bring an entirely new set of tools to work with.

This could include use cases such as:

  • Cargo handling
  • Building maintenance
  • Optimizing warehouse or retail operations
  • Architecture and construction

Digital twins can also be used to train and rehearse scenarios with people without interfering the normal operations.

Digital twins of existing physical spaces are easy to create using simple 3D scanning. They enable numerous business cases depending on the type of the venue and the digital layer we want to build on top of the 3D model. Some examples:

  • Hotels, restaurants, entertainment and real estates: Scan your most impressive properties into 3D models to enable innovative marketing, better customer experience and new business models.
  • Virtual galleries and shops: Turn your physical gallery or shop into an eCommerce solution. 
  • Hospitals and other public spaces: Helping visitors to navigate, providing check-in experience, showing customer history data and other functionalities in one place.  
  • Guiding company employees: Any company can scan their office buildings and provide the traditional intranet type of content on top of that, in context and location-based, which makes finding information easier for the end-user. 
  • Employee training and onboarding: The intranet type of approach of scanning offices can be extended to any environment from car repair shops to restaurant kitchens and hospitals for training purposes.

Digital twins provide a platform for numerous business scenarios that can be imagined only after seeing one. For example, we can bring data and AI on top of the models or jump inside of them using VR headsets. Thus, we encourage every company to get started with our quick and dir… productive proof of concept project, that takes just weeks to complete.

Book a workshop

Workshop: Introduction to Metaverse

What is Metaverse and what opportunities it can bring to your organization, such as business and business process development, employee experience, employee training, or work practices? How is working life changing due to the possibilities of metaverse?

Fill out the form and book a free one-hour workshop!

Learn more about metaverse

Webinar recording: How to use current metaverse solutions to develop business in an agile way?

How metaverse solutions can be utilized e.g. hospitals, hotels, restaurants, online shopping and real estate already now? How, for example, can public spaces and employee experience be developed?

There are a lot of fruits to pick right away, with existing solutions and light projects! Order a free webinar recording in English and see a comprehensive set of concrete examples.

Can industrial metaverse solve the labour shortage challenge? Explore the project

Sulava is involved in a project that VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd) has started. The joint project renews industrial work and involves both companies offering industrial work, i.e. those using solutions, and companies providing solutions. The companies participating are e.g. Valmet Automotive, KONE, Finavia and YIT.

“This project has strengthened our belief in the realization of the metaverse faster than we thought. In Finland’s leading industrial companies, business is already done at least pointwise in the metaverse. Now we just need to connect the points together and implement the new ways of working for the entire organization,” says Karoliina Partanen.

The state of Metaverse, OpenAI (and ChatGPT) on Azure today

One of the hottest topic in the media and every where has been OpenAI and especially ChatGPT. OpenAI Azure Service is already available and combined with the metaverse the future is here.

Our CEO Aki Antman wrote a post on these as he thinks everyone should be experimenting with the metaverse and AI – starting today. And not just experimenting, our customers are already using these in production. And you should be, too. 

Connect physical places to the metaverse with Dynamics 365 solutions

Dynamics 365 solutions have been on the first wave of creating metaverse solutions to the real life applications, especially when thinking manufacturing industry, maintenance, process automation, retail and field workers.

You could use the solutions e.g. for bringing your space information to the digital world to better understand how people are using the space and enable the use of AI to generate alerts and insights to optimize that space. You could bring real information to back the data driven decision making and Guides -solution how to make job guidance with Mixed Reality.

Read more and get inspired by use cases from our blog!

How Metaverse revolutionizes learning and training in the future

How will we train and learn in Metaverse in the future? What new opportunities does new technology bring us? TLDR; a lot – to the point where Metaverse changes many ways in learning & education and how we practice on physical and digital world.

The Metaverse brings new opportunities to learn and look at things from a new perspective, which is not possible in the real world and also makes trainings more efficient.

Use case examples how business and organizations can use Metaverse

What makes Metaverse such a big game changer? What else can you do with it besides meetings? We don’t even know everything yet, because with Metaverse only imagination is the limit. Here are some examples to take inspiration from.

Microsoft Mesh – THE platform for the Metaverse

Microsoft Mesh is a product that often comes up when talking about the Metaverse and the future of work. What are Mesh and Mesh for Teams and what do they offer for working life? Get to know the core principles!