The Future of the Metaverse + AI and Data Looks Bright

We're on the cusp of major breakthroughs in the metaverse, that collective world of new augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences that is gaining steam. The new meta modality will not only be a huge new source of user and behavioral data for enterprises, but it will be a fertile ground for deploying rapidly maturing AI technologies like NLP and computer vision. AR and VR technologies have been simmering on the backburner for years. Up to this point, VR has primarily been used for immersive video games, although a few enterprise software companies have dabbled in AR and VR interfaces, including Looker before it was snapped up by Google Cloud. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put the collective worlds of AR and VR, i.e. the metaverse, firmly on the front burner last month when he announced Facebook was changing its name to Meta.