- Artificial Intelligence is an efficient use of computation to automate activities that require human cognizance.
- Metaverse is the future of the internet providing for an immersive experience and making things possible that are not possible in the real world using VR.
- AI and metaverse combination can be used to drastically advance metaverse and increase its adoption for real-life use cases.
Artificial Intelligence and metaverse are two of the most buzzed-around words these days. Metaverse is going to bring all our experiences to the virtual space and enhance things we can’t even possibly do in real life. The possibilities of AI applications are endless, even concerning to some point.
AI has everything that can make the metaverse so much better and efficient, and make it possible, what was envisioned for a virtual universe to look like in the early days of its inception. The two technological interventions when used together make a futuristic cutting-edge technology.
What Does it Mean to Have AI and Metaverse in Combination?
Artificial Intelligence is the technique of simulating processes that require human intelligence, by computer machines. These machines are run by encoding algorithms into them as set programs to make them respond to yield useful results for an input command. The responses are pre-defined based on certain factors. Today, AI is used so widely for everything that it has become an indispensable part of human lives.
Metaverse is the virtual world of the internet that enables an immersive experience for the users, who perform all the activities by entering that world. It is built upon virtual reality and augmented reality and uses hardware and software tools to immerse the users into the digital world. The concept was first introduced by an American fiction author in his novel Snow Crash in 1992.
The combination of the two technologies can be ground-breaking. In the earliest days of the metaverse invention, people were going to the digital world to see something new. But they soon stopped having a real-life utility, lost interest and stopped caring about it.
Ever since it first came to be seen as a feasible technology, it lacked as many use cases and efficiency. But modern AI techniques help drastically improve not only the development of the metaverse but also its functionality and the real-life cases where it can be used. It allows business growth and innovation and devises technologies to bypass human disabilities.
A lot of blockchain and Web3 are being built on AI. Metaverse is poised to come to the decentralized Web3. NFTs, for example, present an excellent applicability to solve many problems in the virtual world and are used extensively in it. Hence, AI’s venture into this extended reality was inevitable.
Domains in Metaverse where Blockchain can be Used
- Operational base layer
For the metaverse to be efficient, it will have to be constantly active and massively scalable. AI can automate many IT-related operations, process determination, environment curation, event correlation, anomaly detection, identifying causes of problems and solving them. These functionalities are key to maintaining a robust hardware and software infrastructure to provide for a highly immersive digital environment.
- User interface
User interface development and constant upgradation will always be needed to make the ecosystem accessible to the most uneducated and disabled people. Digital interaction, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for language translation and speech recognition, image detection etc. are some of the AI functionalities that will be fundamental to it as a platform.
- Advanced smart contracts
The smart contract technology will be exploited to enable system functionalities and secure transactions. Eliminating intermediaries, protecting ownership and democratizing the system as a whole, are all ensured by the advanced smart contracts that are capable of carrying out high-level propositions and are highly scalable. AI can easily address this.
- AI as a content creation partner
Recent AI bots helping in content creation and moderation can be leveraged in a digitally immersive world for better human assistance. They can be used for content generation, suggesting ideas, simple drawings, realistic images, 3D models, creative writing, formal writing, research etc.
- Media sifting
Social media, media events and hosting virtual events like interviews, press briefings, office meetings, weddings and concerts are pretty much what started the metaverse. Machine algorithms can display your content or bring you the content you want to consume. Besides, hate speech and abuse must also be alleviated, content relevance, avoiding bias, etc. will bring a better SocialFi to the ecosystem.
Examples of AI and Metaverse Combination Use-Cases
- Smart communication
AI tools can be used to act in the metaverse. It could be completely automated or assisted. It will help users easily navigate the virtual world. Exchange-traded Products (ETPs) and smart blockchain solutions will require smart communication between the consumer and the platform.
- AI bots
AI bots can be used for a wide variety of tasks in the metaverse, such as providing efficient chatting between users and software, customer service, taking orders, organizing and managing data, etc.
- Virtual retail stores
Virtual retail stores based in the metaverse can use intelligent algorithms to display relevant products and services to different customers. Help them view stuff as per their order, organize and manage virtual inventories, automate the movement of products, etc.
- Sales and marketing
AI can help with presenting efficient marketing solutions, data gathering, market research, etc. with its machine learning and data modeling techniques. It can collect data and then present a personalized choice of services and products for a consumer demographic. It can analyze the market and customize strategies.
- Real estate
Real estate companies can develop metaverse-based virtual tours of physical properties, completely resembling them in size, structure and architecture. This will attract buyers as they get a more realistic sense of what the actual property looks like.
- Gaming
Gaming is currently the largest market use case for the metaverse. AI can enable smart, hyper-personalized games, difficulty adjustments based on players’ capabilities for better engagement, personalized sports plans, etc. It can also be used to automatically and efficiently execute GameFi. Players can have a more interactive experience with advanced Non-Player Characters (NPCs).
- People with disabilities
Metaverse has an excellent use case for physically challenged people. They can use AI to personalize audio-visual and sensory experiences based on different people’s disabilities. It will create a more equitable environment for opportunities accessible to all.
- Immersive learning
Immersive learning experiences benefit not only people without disabilities but also physically and mentally challenged people and those with learning disabilities. It will drastically improve how students experience education by stimulating multiple senses and providing real-time sensory experiences of various processes that cannot be carried out in reality. AI will assist in efficiently generating these academics.
- Digital twin
Digital avatars of people and objects and virtualized forms of processes will intensively use AI to enable digital twin technology in the metaverse. Computer vision and deep learning are fundamental to developing accurate and realistic models.
- Ensuring security, transparency and privacy in the Metaverse
Probably the most important use case for why AI must be adopted in the metaverse is security. AI can be used to authenticate processes, transactions and identities in the metaverse. Computer vision, image recognition, speech recognition, exoskeletal biometrics and other KYC techniques can be employed.
Different privacy tools, like Self-Sovereign Identities (SSIs), can be used to ensure public privacy. AI can easily identify bad actors and malicious activity, notify users, and automatically work to eradicate it then and there. All of this creates a very safe and transparent environment for users of the metaverse.
AI can also be implemented to protect data, prevent misuse, determine the authenticity and accuracy of information, and prevent propaganda, fake news and false information. These things become very important as the metaverse enables all forms of media, including social media, which heavily uses it with a very strong and lasting impact on its audience.
Recent Projects Extensively Using AI in Their Metaverse Platforms
Many projects are exploring the cross-section of metaverse platforms with AI.
- Minecraft and Second Life are leveraging AI in their games to develop more realistic and dynamic virtual world environments and characters. NVIDIA’s Omniverse is heavily deploying AI to develop metaverse platforms and provide tools for third-party developers as well.
- MetaGen is another metaverse developer provider using AI-based tools like open-source machine learning models, and developer platforms like VTubers and AI Friends for entertainment content creation.
- Futureverse is the leading platform in development with the collaboration of more than a dozen startups and tech providers. It is an ambitious metaverse project extensively incorporating AI technology.
- Meta has developed a generative AI bot, Builder Bot for developing different on-demand metaverses. Its CAIRaoke project is working on developing a fully end-to-end neural model for building AI assistants. Ego4D is another project of the company for first-person perspectives on the virtual world dataset.
- Apple’s Spatial Computing project is working on AI-based metaverse development.
- Indian retailer Flipkart is working on Flipverse to develop an AI-powered virtual storefront that will allow customers to browse items before buying them.
After metaverse became a buzzword for the first time with the initial development, it went to the back burner for a good while. Meanwhile, AI took the forefront. It never lost clout. However, with its increased use cases and VR’s reduced practicality, many believed that algorithmic experiences were far more valuable than virtual ones, thereby making the metaverse futile in light of AI technology.
But the current reality dictates that AI is not a metaverse killer; rather, AI has revived the metaverse, and it’s back with greater utility than ever before.
