How to tap into India’s exploding gaming market

Learn how developers and studios of every size can successfully grow their titles in one of the fastest-growing markets in the world.

The idea of the metaverse has been percolating in tech circles since Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. This was the year after the World Wide Web was open to the public, and before websites for general use became widely available. The idea is that many virtual spaces will converge with the internet to form one large virtual world where we can all conduct our lives digitally. Tim Sweeney of Epic has spoken about how gaming may evolve into the metaverse. And Microsoft CEO characterised Azure digital twins and IoT as a metaverse in his earnings call last week.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to be the most passionate proponent of the metaverse, acknowledging in a recent interview in The Verge that “I’ve been thinking about some of this stuff since I was in middle school and just starting to code.” He stirred a lot of interest in late June when he announced to his staff than an overarching goal was to connect many of the company’s initiatives to help bring the metaverse to life. And he has outlined a number of factors that are paving the way:

• The concept of “presence” and being engaged with friends and colleagues more naturally with spatial references
• Virtual reality and the investment Facebook has made to enable broad VR adoption with the Quest 2
• The promise of augmented reality and the ability to seamlessly overlay digital data and imagery on the physical world using comfortable headsets
• The importance of being able to access content across any hardware including PC, mobile, gaming consoles, and XR headsets, and portability across software platforms
• The limitations of interacting with one another through the ”little glowing rectangle” of a phone screen (and by implication the limitations imposed by Google and Apple who control the operating systems on mobile devices)
• The limitations of interacting with people by means of an endless sea of little rectangles on Zoom
• The value of visually sharing multiple images or data sets concurrently in a “digital whiteboard room” rather than one page of one document at a time on a Zoom call.

How will Facebook’s metaverse initiatives impact the enterprise?

Facebook’s business model will evolve toward the metaverse concept, and some of the stepping stone technologies that Facebook is investing in will change how businesses interact with their customers and how individuals on business teams work with each other. At some point, we may see a metaverse evolve that creates a new community with enhanced presence, a forum and marketplace for content creators of various stripes, and new forms of digital commerce. But it is unlikely that this metaverse will suddenly appear next year, causing a new “land grab” and disrupting the existing social network advertising model.

Instead, enterprises have time to prepare for this scenario. However, some of the stepping stone elements of Facebook’s metaverse journey are here today and can be used to enhance existing enterprise product and service offerings and gain experience. A number of the factors Zuckerberg has highlighted hint at future metaverse scenarios that may be valuable to begin planning for.

Adopting existing metaverse building blocks

The Quest 2 is a self-contained unit with very good visual performance, spatial sound, and excellent hand tracking at a remarkable $299 price point. The available content today is largely for gaming, but the headset is capable of supporting compelling enterprise applications as well. It provides an excellent viewing device for team-based VR scenario or procedure training. 360-degree video viewed through the Quest 2 provides the experience of presence for product demonstrations or museum displays. A Quest 2 headset can be sent to a client for less than the cost of a salesperson’s visit and used to demonstrate a product in a much more engaging way than a typical video or slide show. Immersive VR advertising will become important in the metaverse, but there is no reason not to experiment with it now.

Zuckerberg is right that we were not meant to interact with each other via little rectangles on a mobile device or a Zoom screen. Facebook Horizon is an early effort to create “presence,” providing a VR space where you can interact with cartoon avatars of friends. Presumably it will evolve into a social space where small groups of professional colleagues or client teams can interact more naturally.

In the meantime, prepare for the metaverse and adopt development platforms that allow content to be easily made available on PC, mobile, and XR headsets. New dev platforms make the process of creating of multiplatform 3D content more akin to creating a PowerPoint than to creating a AAA game or feature film. Some also provide the ability to develop applications collaboratively, with colleagues from multiple sites working simultaneously on the same editor screen. This recreates the experience of working together in a meeting room. It can be valuable to gain organizational experience in building digital avatars, and 3D content, and new tools for collaboration.

Future metaverse building blocks

Augmented reality glasses are a key priority for Zuckerberg. Apple, Microsoft, and several smaller firms are also working on the challenge of creating comfortable headgear that seamlessly overlays the digital world onto the physical one. Launch dates are still uncertain, but it is likely there will be significant steps forward in the next 24 months.

There is a lot more opportunity with AR than “presence” during a conversation with a colleague. Spatial and workflow applications on future AR headsets will be important productivity tools for front-line workers. Hands-free gesture or voice control provides much more natural engagement. Using visual, acoustic, and other sensors coupled to AI for identifying patterns can allow the parallel digital world to incorporate the current situation in the physical world and make that available to team members irrespective of location. Gain experience with these technologies now. They can run on mobile devices and easily transition to AR headsets as those headsets become cost effective and comfortable.

Community, creators, and digital commerce in the future metaverse

Roblox and YouTube already provide examples of marketplaces for user-generated content. The future metaverse is expected to expand the role of creators to share and monetize content. Emerging platforms such as ToneStone bring user-generated content to new markets such as music creation. There is value in gaining experience in channelling such content.

Digital commerce will evolve to incorporate more immersive experiences, AR and VR tools, and perhaps less dependence on specific platforms. Organization can gain experience with these trends now and be prepared to take advantage of metaverse opportunities as they evolve.

A number of companies build critical tools for the graphics technology, gaming, computer aided design, application development, and geospatial industries who will likely play important roles in providing critical elements for the emerging metaverse.

Facebook has nearly 3 billion monthly active users, Fortnite has 350 million active users, and Roblox and Minecraft have commanded 200 million active users. The scale of a potential metaverse as a more interactive, richly detailed evolution of the world wide web, has huge implications for how we keep in touch, play, and work. While Facebook would like to control the metaverse, Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is unlikely any single company will do so. Still, the company has provided some useful new devices, capabilities, and observations that are likely to shape the future metaverse.  There is much to learn here.

David Brebner is founder and CEO of Umajin, which creates SaaS apps for mobile, AR/VR, IoT, and AI. He previously founded apps company Fingertapps and user experience research company Unlimited Realities.

Data-driven creative for sensitive verticals

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Our Data, Analytics, & Intelligent Automation Summit at Transform 2021 on Tuesday took a deep dive into how data, analytics, and intelligent automation can help the greater good, the bottom line, and more.

The day, presented by Accenture, kicked off with the Big Bytes in AI & Data breakfast, presented by Accenture. Leaders from Accenture, American Express, Opendoor, Evernorth, and Google ultimately agreed that the quality of the data under their AI solutions is non-negotiable.

As Valerie Nygaard, product lead at Google Duplex, said, “You can make tons of tech innovations, but so much of the time they rely on the quality of the data, that accuracy, the normalization, the processing, and the handling.”

The American Express credit and fraud risk group uses models powered by machine learning to monitor $1.2 trillion in charges annually around the world, and return 8 billion risk decisions in real time, said Anjali Dewan, vice president of risk management, consumer marketing and enterprise personalization decision science at American Express.

“Having the discipline to make sure that the quality of that data is consistent, starting from evaluation when you put it into production, is a key competitive advantage,” she explained.

Opendoor’s valuation models, which service more than 90,000 customers, and enable more than $10 billion in real estate over 30 markets, are only as worthwhile as their data input, said co-founder and CTO Ian Wong. To ensure coverage and accuracy, they’ve built custom inspector apps that use a human expert to collect first-party data and then input it back into their central repository in real time.

It takes time to collect and manage data, ensure it is high quality and governed, and then organize it to drive insights, said Mark Clare, enterprise head of data strategy and enablement at Evernorth/Cigna. But the new agile, collaborative processes and visual-based discovery Cigna helped one financial services company implement led to the company discovering an eight-figure attrition risk in less than 30 minutes.

One big takeaway for Ahmed Chakraborty, global managing director, applied intelligence North America lead at Accenture, is that when you take a data-driven journey in the enterprise, it’s a change journey, and a big part of the change is to drive adoption.

“I call this the last-mile connection,” he said. “Literacy around data is critical. Elevating the entire acumen of your enterprise to understand data, understand what you can do with data, is so critical in the long-term journey to drive adoption and the change in your culture.”

“Cloud to survive. AI to thrive: How CXOs are navigating the path to data-driven reinvention”

The Summit’s keynote featured Hari Sivaraman, head of AI content strategy at VentureBeat, in conversation with Accenture’s Sanjeev Vohra, global lead – applied intelligence.

Post-pandemic, there’s been a massive shift toward data, AI, and cloud to create greater good, greater revenue, and greater efficiencies.

Vohra identified four key fundamental changes he and his team have seen, particularly in the past year. First, is that cloud and data have come together as superpowers. On the one side, he explained, is the proliferation of cloud which provides much higher levels of compute power and the flexibility to scale up and scale down, depending on the need. That’s combined with vast amounts of data now available both inside companies or obtained from third-parties.

“Data and cloud are a huge trend we see powering the entire planet and it has really advanced during the pandemic,” he said.

The second trend is that the C-suite from companies across industries are now actually interested in these technologies and how they can be used to derive business value. “It has  has moved out of the experimentation zone, or pilot zone,” he said, “to be used for scale.”

Speed is the third trend. As Vohra explained, “Nobody wants to spend two years, three years trying to drive value. [Business leaders] are really getting serious about saying what can be done in six months.”

The last trend is talent. It’s scarce, and the demand is coming from everywhere. So companies now are having to make important decisions about how much investment is required for building staff, and what portion is focused on building internally versus recruiting from the outside.

Later in the discussion, Vohra shared one of the projects he is particularly excited about. Along with Intel and the Philippines-based Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation, Accenture is saving the coral reef with AI and edge computing that monitors, characterizes, and analyzes coral reef resiliency. Accenture’s Applied Intelligence Video Analytics Services Platform (VASP) detects and classifies marine life, and the data is then sent to a surface dashboard. With analytics and trends in real-time, researchers make data-driven decisions that are helping the reef progress even as we speak (or as you read).

Cigna C-suite executives discuss the impact of AI and digital interactions in transforming the health of their customers

During the AI in health panel, Gina Papush, global chief data and analytics officer at Evernorth/Cigna, had a conversation with Joe Depa, global managing director at Accenture, about how they’re using actionable intelligence to make health care more predictable, efficient, and most importantly, effective.

Their major focus over the past year and a half has been been understanding the impact of COVID geographically and across different population segments.

“One of the things we’ve uncovered is that without a doubt, there are differences in terms of how COVID is impacting different groups of customers, and particularly Black and Hispanic customers,” she said.

The organization partnered with their clinical and customer experience teams, working with employers locally in those markets, to bring a concerted, data-driven efforts to drive outreach. They proactively distributed PPE and education about preventing infections, and managing illness. And as vaccinations rolled out, they worked with customer employers to get these to vaccination sites.

Once they shifted focus to studying post-COVID effects, particularly long-haul COVID, they found that in patients with long-haul COVID, many customers have pre-existing chronic conditions such as heart inflammation and heart disease, which are prevalent at higher rates in communities of color. Now they’re focused on identifying risks, and data science teams are building models and applying models to identify those who may be at risk post-COVID for severe complications.

“It’s critical that post-COVID care continues, and our predictive analytics enable us to be more pinpointed in driving that care to the right folks,” Papush said.

Understanding consumer behaviour with big data & delivering AI powered products that offer personalized recommendations

This AI in retail panel, presented by Accenture, unpacked the ultra-personalization trend with AI leaders from DoorDash, Nike, and Accenture.

“It became more apparent every day that the post-pandemic acceleration of digitization has changed the way people consume and interact with products in all categories,” said Lan Guan, applied intelligence global solutions AI lead at Accenture. “AI has leapfrogged to indulge consumer demand for exactly what they want, when they still want it. That’s what ultra-personalization is all about.”

For DoorDash, this personalization centers around what the company calls “the restaurant selection problem,” explained Alok Gupta, head of data science and machine learning at DoorDash.

Consumers come to DoorDash with a specific food in mind. Their data scientists are focused on understanding what that desire is, and identify potential new restaurant partners that can help make the DoorDash app’s restaurant and food selection as robust as possible.

With digital demand exploding at Nike, their whole model had to shift, said Emily White, Nike VP of enterprise data and analytics. The company used AI and machine learning to automate internal processes to gain speed and launch a new distribution facility to fully support their growing digital demand.

Her team created a replenishment engine to read the signal, identify available inventory across all of Nike’s distribution centers and stores, and determine which products should be allocated to the Adapt facility in Tennessee to best serve the southeast region. It’s their largest distribution center worldwide, built to distribute the company’s Nike and Jordan products to individual consumers, wholesale customers, and Nike’s retail channels as efficiently as possible in the new digital-first world.

“The outcome of this is decreasing transportation time and cost, improving our sustainability, and helping us react faster to our local demand,” she said.

One of Accenture’s clients, a fashion brand, used AI and an ultra-personalization approach to go from passively offering just a few clothing collections a year to responding to what’s still hot in the market. They collect real-time consumer feedback from across social media platforms with AI and machine learning. Within just a couple of hours, designers translate this information into product ideas and send them to micro-studios for experimental production.

“Two quick results here,” Guan said. “25% growth in yearly revenue, and 29%-plus increase in revenue-per-visit, all because of that ultra-personalization.”