Porsche and Meta Collaborate to Showcase the Potential of the Metaverse

This month, Porsche partnered with XR giant Meta to leverage its Quest 3 MR headsets to create immersive presentations for upcoming vehicles in a bid to showcase how emerging Metaverse services provide business value.

The firm uses Meta Quest 3 headsets to create a new method of collaboration and outreach for the automotive industry, from event presentations to engineering walkthroughs.

The firm notes that conventional automotive collaboration and outreach processes require “countless” PowerPoint slides – a “status quo ripe for being challenged,” the firm remarked.

While Microsoft, Apple, and others are working to improve conventional digital presentation methods with spatial computing variants of productivity applications, a more innovative approach is welcome. Meta is looking to leverage fully enterprise-ready immersive, shared VR environments to promote its Metaverse vision.

With its Meta partnership, Porsche allows multiple attendees to move around and interact with a shared VR environment during new and upcoming product showcases.

Moreover, the firm claims that its move towards MR showcases a stride towards demonstrating Metaverse use cases, with an engineer speaking on behalf of Porsche adding:

Already, presenting in this way feels like it has become second nature. The storyline of the content works like a traditional presentation. You have your notes on a virtual billboard that only the host can see, and you click through life-sized, immersive 3D animations that are free from the confines of a screen – you’re standing within the presentation, surrounded by it.

The Metaverse space is turbulent. The space faced serious hurdles last year, and the Metaverse is yet to recover. However, enterprise partnerships like Porsche’s can present some potential use cases for the Metaverse as it continues to find its first steps.

NVIDIA Omniverse to Boost the Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is a growing sector for XR solution providers. From product development to marketing, immersive services are finding various homes in the field.

NVIDIA is currently working on Omniverse, which is an extensive XR framework designed to help AR/VR/MR solution providers create immersive workplace applications. At CES 2024, NVIDIA announced several new project partners to present new levels of XR usability for automotive clients.

NVIDIA is collaborating with several companies, including ITONE, Brickland, Configit, Katana Studio, WPP ZeroLight, and Lotus, to achieve this automotive-facing vision. With this move, NVIDIA aims to assist automotive companies in utilizing XR development tools to match the use cases of the auto industry, particularly in customer experience and auto-configuration operations.

NVIDIA’s optimized hardware, software, and partner ecosystem can also add value to automotive-focused original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and agencies. The firm states that OEM workers can utilize Omniverse to work on digital equipment or product twins. With the latest update, the company has provided a streamlined route that simplifies OEM access and requires fewer manual setup procedures.

Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA also introduced digital twins across production factories in 2023. The partnership leveraged NVIDIA’s Omniverse industrial metaverse platform to boost manufacturing efficiency, allowing Mercedes-Benz to save money, time, and energy in production.

Jörg Burzer, a Board Member of the Mercedes-Benz Group, said.

Mercedes-Benz is initiating a new era of automotive manufacturing thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence, MB.OS and the digital twin based on Nvidia Omniverse into the MO360 ecosystem. With our new ‘Digital First’ approach, we unlock efficiency potential even before the launch of our MMA models in our global production network and can accelerate the ramp-up significantly.

The automotive space has always had eyes on XR. With vehicles being such a high-value resource, capital cannot be wasted, and XR may provide an affordable avenue for the industry to optimize workflows.