Per Ottosson is the CEO at Artificial Solutions, a leading company in Conversational AI. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the beginning of March, two conversational topics kept coming up: 5G and the metaverse. When I say metaverse, I'm not just talking about "Meta," Facebook's recent rebrand, but about the many different virtual worlds that companies are creating. The metaverse has been around for a long time. Just look at what Microsoft has been building over the past few years.

Autonomous cars, commonly known as self-driving cars, aren't new in Japan -- nor the automotive industry. But whilst the rest of the developed world is pushing for autonomous vehicles largely for reasons of safety and convenience for people in general, Japan's a little different. It's to compensate for its aging population. The Japanese ageing population is in need of transportation -- but the country is plagued by persistent labor shortages. "In the cargo and transport sectors, drivers have become older and the shortage of human resources has become serious," a recent METI report said.

Nissan's self-driving taxi service is ready for its first passengers. The firm will begin testing the service, dubbed'Easy Ride', in Japan next week ahead of launching it commercially in 2020. Working alongside Tokyo-based mobile developer DeNA, the service will ferry passengers around a 2.8 mile stretch of Yokohama. Nissan has admitted the technology is not perfect and the cars would crash without occasional human intervention. However, the latest development is a challenge to ride-hailing companies such as Uber who are hoping to develop their own driverless taxi service.

Nissan will start testing its self-driving taxi service Easy Ride in a few days in hopes of launching it in time for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The automaker and Tokyo-based mobile developer DeNA will begin ferrying passengers in Yokohama on March 5th. Nissan's autonomous cars will only be able to drive them along a set route, a 2.8-mile-long stretch of road between Nissan's HQ and the Yokohama World Porters shopping center. But they'll at least be able to give the Easy Ride app's features a try during their trip. Passengers will be able to tell the app via text or voice what activity they want to do while in the area.

YOKOHAMA – Nissan Motor Co. and mobile game-maker DeNA Co. said Friday that they will launch an autonomous-driving taxi service for a two-week experiment in Yokohama next month, with the participation of 300 groups of people who will be asked to give feedback after using the ride-hailing app. The companies aim to officially launch a full service in the early 2020s. The world has yet to see a hailing service for a self-driving taxi, so "we are going to learn about some of the things that maybe we can't foresee without actual testing," said Ogi Redzic, senior vice president of the existing alliance among Nissan, Renault SA of France and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., during a news conference in Yokohama. The field experiment for the self-driving taxi service, which will be named Easy Ride, will take participants on a 4.5 kilometer electric vehicle tour around Nissan's headquarters in the Minato Mirai area of Yokohama between March 5 and March 18. The route is fixed, but the users will go through the full process of hailing the car via an app and then setting a destination.