22 May 2023 by Mondo2.0

Virtual Meetings via A.I., a step towards the Metaverse

Raise your hand if your agenda is not full of online meetings, meetings to decide, evaluate, clarify, meetings that were already not very interesting in the real world, face-to-face, now digitally transferred into our aseptic “smart-world”. The online meeting. an impersonalized mode of communication, has brought clear benefits in travel, in the management and optimization of working time, in the creation or expansion of work or research teams, in sharing information in real time, but which, at the same time, a little like what already happened with e-mails, has also led to significant distortions in use.

After all, all of us, even industry professionals, the first digital generation, have to experiment; we do not have established references and strategies. Sometimes, let’s admit it, during the video conference we learn the meaning of the icons and tools available, we improve our way of communicating “as we go”.

Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Skype, Webex, … today do I let myself be partly seen through the video camera or not? Do I suggest sharing the screen? I almost feel like saying that …

In these few lines we try to go beyond the different personal attitudes, initially impersonal, today, after a few years of use, verbose, probably precisely because of the lack of empathy and face-to-face interaction.

Let us try together to identify a digital path, a direction, new ways of communicating, made possible by “new generation” meeting platforms.

Here too, as with many other services, we are only at the beginning.

The near future, just around the corner, foresees the spread of virtual meeting platforms, that is, video-conferencing platforms where the communication and discussion experience will be extremely realistic, concrete, “almost tangible”. It will be A.I., artificial intelligence, combined with more efficient devices, that will create a three-dimensional effect, giving depth and concreteness to the people we are talking to.
An example? Google’s recently presented evolution of the “Starline” project.

Having people in front of us, in a digital context, who seem real stimulates our facial expressions, increases our gesturing and the possibility of nodding our heads; it makes it possible to create empathy, to infer from the expressions of our interlocutor(s) how they feel about our statements.

But there is more: it will be virtual meeting platforms that will open a door onto the Metaverse over the next decade.

The widespread diffusion of increasingly realistic digital communication will allow a daily, different digital projection of ourselves; it will open up immersive communication experiences, including with conversational agents, automatons also characterized by a 3D appearance and the ability to answer every question we ask. The ChatBots we have discussed so much in our previous articles on this blog.

Our avatars, our digital projections, will meet at a concert, at an exhibition in a museum, in a virtual cinema, in a school or university classroom, at a symposium. We will meet digitally, every day, people who live very far from us or next door, or bots able to tell us everything about the painting we are looking at in the virtual Museum, which we entered after paying for an online ticket with our PayPal.

This will have important effects in terms of sustainability, reducing our travel, on our social capacity and need to interact, on our perception of other people, in our urban areas and in the management of space and lighting in our homes.

One day our great-grandchildren will study in school books how the pandemic, in the 21st century, led to the spread of the first video-conferencing platforms, the fact, incredible to them, that they were not 3D, and how in the following years, in a short time, the evolution of these communication tools projected us into the Metaverse; they will find it absurd and ridiculous that the first platforms connected only human beings, and not (also) human beings and bots.

They will study the progressive, inevitable and digital transition from World 1.0 to World 2.0, which began with the use of simple meeting platforms.

Mondoduepuntozero.