This presentation will provide some perspectives old and new on the importance of the metaverse.
Speaker
Ian Hughes
Agenda
6:00pm - Networking and food
6:30pm - Talk by Ian Hughes
7:30pm - Questions and answers
8:30pm - Event ends
Synopsis
The Metaverse concept has been bouncing around for decades, and many may consider that it is no longer a primary focus given the rise of AI, possibly that it is even dead!
More than ever, though, metaverse techniques are becoming a significant way we interact with one another and with data. It is not all avatars and virtual land, though that’s part of some of it, but it includes a much richer fusion of real-time digital communication and is increasingly likely to be powered by GenAI.
In many ways, metaverse is something that is happening gradually, and we may not even notice, especially when many of the key developments are now in manufacturing and industry as part of wider digital transformations. Where are we with the metaverse in industrial, enterprise and social spaces?
This presentation will provide some perspectives, old and new, on the importance of the metaverse (or whatever we end up calling our real-time digital interactions with AI, robots, factories, virtual worlds, data and one another).
About the speaker
Ian Hughes a.k.a epredator when online, is Chair of the BCS Animation and Games Development Specialist Group.
He has been a gamer since 1970, and this inspired him to a career as a software engineer, there is more on that in the BCS article Memoirs of bedroom coder.
The first 20 years of his career were spent at IBM, where he worked on some of the earliest websites and stores in the late 90’s, including the Wimbledon tennis website for a decade.
In 2006 he helped inspire colleagues and many companies into virtual worlds such as Second Life, starting with the Wimbledon Championship in 2006, officially becoming a metaverse evangelist, investigating and experiencing new and interesting ways to communicate online, many of which are having a resurgence now. The use of game technology continued when he set up Feeding Edge Ltd in 2009, building virtual training hospitals for major incidents and other educational applications.
He presented his own slot as resident super g33k on ITV’s Saturday morning kids TV show The Cool Stuff Collective which ran for 39 episodes in 3 series 2010/11. After many other public speaking and writing roles, he wrote and published two sci-fi novels detailing the adventures of a techie gamer, Roisin, who accidentally comes across a way to manipulate the physical world, as we do with the virtual.
Reconfigure and the follow up Cont3xt have AR, VR, IoT and Quantum computing as a backdrop for adventure and lots of unusual situations. He was amazed and delighted to be presented with an Honorary Doctor of Technology award from Southampton Solent University in 2018.
For the past 8 years he has worked as an industry analyst covering industrial IoT, AR, VR, Autonomous Robots, Metaverse and Games technology at 451 Research part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
He remains a keen gamer and observer of trends across all platforms and genres.
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