Press Releases
26 Jan 2023
DIPMF hosts keynote speaker Professor Jeremy Bailenson on ‘Into the Metaverse’
The 8th DIPMF edition concluded with an insightful keynote from Professor Jeremy Bailenson, Founding Director of Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Standford University. Prof. Jeremy commenced his keynote on what ‘Metaverse’ exactly means and its application in four key areas which included ‘Collaboration and Education’, ‘Project Training’, ‘Empathy and Diversity’ and ‘Telepresence’.
While sighting examples how Metaverse has today become part of everyone’s life he spoke about Dubai’s first-of-its-kind physical NFT shop which opened at Mall of the Emirates and the Emirate’s Metaverse strategy which will open up to 4000 jobs thus revealing a promising future for the city and its people.
According to Prof. Jeremy Metaverse is an alternative universe of ‘People, Place and Things’ which can be used as a useful tool for corporate training and many other relevant areas. In 2021, a metaverse classroom was set up at Standford for 15 months where 500 students participated and 400k minutes were shared. Important factors like hardware, platform, the daily schedules, the VR Content, privacy and the data to be collected were planned. The downsides of VR were also highlighted which included sickness and distractions while on the positive side where small group discussions were much more impactful. The most positive outcome is where students weren’t confined to a particular space size but could expand their boundaries making training interesting and exciting.
Prof. Jeremy added that the training can be expanded to corporate world- ‘Project Training’ where it is proven through companies like Walmart and Bank of America that VR training through the metaverse has been very impactful yet time and resource saving.
The third area is ‘Empathy and Diversity’ which helps people empathize with situations and circumstances if they change their avatar in the metaverse. On the same lines, people can connect and empathize for themselves by connecting to their future selves which could be 20 years older. Such a case study have been used in banks like Bank of America where the camera can build a 3d face model of the customer which is much older and prompt him to plan savings for a promising future. Such a project was called ‘Face Retirement’. Last area is ‘Telepresence’ where two people can be beamed into a metaverse room when they aren’t in a same location.