The American giant Meta returns to the Davos Economic Forum with artificial intelligence and the development of the metaverse as the two great pillars that will mark the scenario of digital platforms and their relationship with users and companies, especially their “extraordinary potential” in fields such as The education.
The metaverse “allows people to do things they couldn’t do before and we’re very excited about that,” Chris Cox, director of product at Meta and head of the family of applications and technologies, said today.
In a presentation to a small group of international media in Davos, Cox announced that the company’s main objective at the Economic Forum will be the metaverse, a virtual world in which companies and users interact, and for which devices are being launched, operating systems or developer toolkits.
“We are starting to see interesting work being done specifically in fields like education, training, medicine and other types of design work,” creating “a new balance” in which users can create and launch products and whose possibilities are limitless, he says.
“Astronauts are beginning to use virtual reality to train in immersive experiences that are difficult to study in a textbook”, with which they hope to convince the business and industrial fabric present in Davos to bet on what they see “as the next platform”, he adds.
To promote the metaverse, the firm led by Mark Zuckerberg has a business unit dedicated to it, with applications such as Meta Horizon Worlds, free and that allows you to visit a constantly expanding social universe made up of more than 10,000 worlds, compatible with your glasses. Virtual Meta Quest.
“The transformative potential of this new computing platform will affect nearly every aspect of everything we do on our phones and computers today. But one of the things that I think has become more obvious to us as we work with early-stage developers is the extraordinary potential of education,” said Nick Clegg, head of global affairs at Meta.
In this sense, he highlights how the metaverse allows the creation of virtual classrooms and universities “with the potential to take a class of 12-year-olds for a walk through the streets of Rome or walk among dinosaurs,” said Clegg, former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom. .
Developments in the metaverse have also reached other fields of application as disparate as nursing or plumbing, with learning modules for users.
A metaverse that requires the massive support of companies, educational centers or the industry itself: “In the end this will not come to life until there is content that you can use and content that you can use that you think will be good for society, good for children, good for the collective in general to obtain broader collective benefits”, he assured.
Meta, which recently announced a cut of nearly 11,000 workers around the world to alleviate the fall in its online commerce, believes that this is a decision that responds to its interest in operating “in the most efficient way possible” in an environment versatile macroeconomics.
A decision that will allow them to focus on the metaverse “and prioritize what we hope will have greater global appeal in the long term,” he concluded.