Ian Hughes is a Senior Research Analyst for the Internet of Things practice at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. He has 30 years of experience in emerging technology as a developer, architect and consultant through key technology trends.
Ian has 20 years of experience at IBM in cross-industry application development. This included automotive, global sporting events, retail and telecommunications.
Ian was early to the web development space in 1998 and social media in 2004, and was influential in virtual-worlds adoption in 2006-09. He has spent the past seven years at his own consulting company, where he presented a regular emerging technology feature on a UK Saturday morning children's TV show, built virtual disaster simulators for hospitals, pitched startups to investors, wrote a technology column for a fashion magazine and wrote two sci-fi novels. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Technology from Southampton Solent University in 2018.
Virbela has its own eponymous enterprise-grade virtual world application, and is building out its browser-based Frame application. The existing Virbela application is used by the company's owner, eXp World Holdings, for all its internal company operations and culture building.
The metaverse as we define it remains a long-term vision, but core technologies are currently maturing. This report highlights our integrated coverage of the wider metaverse opportunity and how it relates to the current IT and OT landscape. This coverage combines significant enterprise research across our existing channels and data, spanning TMT and S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The company provides a set of enterprise tools to enable users to link 360-degree photography assets or 3D models with traditional web media to create a navigable virtual environment that can be experienced by users in any VR headset, smartphone or on a regular screen embedded in a website, for use cases such as training or customer experience.
The world is dependent on using digital communications and data sharing; the increasingly real-time nature of interactions between people and data is the basis for a future metaverse. On this journey, I-industrial, E-enterprise and S-social use cases across B2B, B2C and C2C are evolving at different rates.
Using its patented strategy for energy-harvesting efforts and low-power managed networking, the vendor has been deploying industrial IoT sensors that require no batteries. It is now enabling other companies to incorporate this technology, the first step being the release of its evaluation and development kits.
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