There are a number of excellent virtual world platforms out there – and a smaller number of them are dedicated to enterprise use. And, an even smaller number of them offer the immense graphical fidelity required for certain applications. Mytaverse is a business-only platform with special tools for digital twins and virtual assets, and I’ve been around the world.
What is Mytavers?
Mytavers was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic and has seen its fair share of remote events and virtual work solutions since then. Around this time last year, the company hosted an innovation-focused Pepsi-led event that brought together more than 300 representatives from Google, Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, Amazon and Apple for the first time. others on the platform.
“Our business is growing rapidly and we’re getting a lot of traction,” Inside Sales Manager Robert Mc Illece told me during a worldwide interview and tour of the platform.
The platform is not just about remote presence. They recognize that the metaverse will never replace in person. More importantly from a business perspective, the metaverse needs to replace in-person encounters much less often than two years ago. Luckily, the platform has a way with virtual models – which might have a longer and more varied lifespan than virtual people.
The platform has special tools for displaying and visualizing virtual models. These can be digital collectibles or digital twins. Businesses can contribute their own templates or work with the Mytaverse team to create templates to use in their apps.
Digital twins are not only visible, they can also be configured to be configured in real time. During maintenance, I change the exterior colors of model cars – and the interior colors of a model airplane while standing inside.
All of this is made even more impressive by the first major update to the Mytaverse platform, partially funded by a recent funding round of $7.6 million. The update brought Unreal Engine 5 to the platform (Did we mention Unreal is a technology partner?), as well as a neat integration with the cross-platform avatar engine Ready player me.
Navigate the platform
“We have been asked for a long time to integrate human avatars. We have used robot avatars for a long time,” says McIllece. “We were going to use Metahumanbut it’s too heavy.
These robot avatars are still available for users who don’t already have Ready Player Me, or who don’t want to take the time to create one on the spot. There are a wide variety of body types to choose from, and all have a screen-like head that can stream the user’s webcam – much like the robots in the Saga comedy series.
It’s natural for Mytaverse team members to have a soft spot for robot avatars, and it’s natural for them to want to team up with their partners at Unreal. However, there’s a sense that Ready Player Me gives a sense of identity due to how universal the avatars become. For example, I used the same avatar in this interview as in a recent tour of Spatial.
No matter what avatar system you’re using, emotes are provided ranging from handy, like waving, to a programmable key to dance a jig. The avatar is controlled by standard WASD commands on a computer or by touch on a mobile device. Need to get somewhere fast? Ride a hoverboard, teleport short distances, or shoot up to “teleport” between campus locations.
The entire experience is browser-based and hardware-agnostic made possible by cloud computing (AWS is also a partner). So far, “hardware independent” doesn’t include headphone support – although that’s planned for the second half of next year. What is the heist? Many headsets don’t yet have the display quality to keep up with Mytaverse graphics.
“We don’t want to weigh down our graphics for a helmet,” says McIllece.
Enterprise only
Writing reviews of platforms like Mytaverse is almost a bit sad. I was really impressed with my visit to the platform. And, I hope to be invited again for some remote event or another. However, it is an enterprise platform, so many readers might never check it out. But, that’s fair, because the platform brings a host of premium tools that enterprise users need more than casual users.