Metaverse is being considered as a big business opportunity by Indian corporates such as Infosys, Tech Mahindra, TCS, HCL and others. Metaverse is being accelerated by conductive environment — developmrnt of technology ecosystem. rising enterpreneurship, smart phones, availability of mobile data plans and large millennial population. In addition, there is going to be 5G penetration, use of NFTS, AR-VR hardware. Metaverse is estimated to have a business of $48 billion in 2022. The business will surge $670 billion by 2030. No Big Tech and IT company can afford to ignore metaverse.
Apart from big revenues, metaverse promises higher business margins, say around 12-15 per cent higher margins. The segments which have tapped metaverse are retail, shopping and gaming currently. There are opportunities in AR, VR and MR components of metaverse business. Some 8-10 per cent business will emerge from the building blocks of the metaverse.
There are opportunities in metaverse use-cases, say avatars, cities, spaces, assets and digital economy.
Metaverse can be used to design products and to detect new ways to interact with the customers.
Thus there demand but there is no enough capacity in metaverse business.
In future, life will be hybrid — there should be templates for immersive retail in metaverse, which allows checkouts there, for the products to be delivered in the physical world. There could be meetings in the metaverse, which are followed up in the real world. Thus hybrid living and working will emerge as a new norm.
In 2022, Infosys has launched Metaverse Foundry. It has a team 500 experts working on different skills and creating templates for metaverse. Infosys has already done metaverse projects for the Australian Open and French Open. Infosys created mixed reality experiences where avatars of fans could interact with others and shop for products.
Tech Mahindra too worked on metaverse — a combination of software and hardware capabilities to offer 3D visual experience to clients. It is offering avatar-as-a-service meta environment, NFT marketplaces, content management and other services.
Accenture has started Continuum. It has hired 1.5 lac employees to work in the metaverse space. It will offer industry-specific solutions to the clients. There are surgical solutions where the surgeons are not physically in the same room.
TCS has made initial investment in the metaverse through its Extended Reality (ER) Lab. Here many team members work of several proof-of-concept projects and use-cases.
As we have already observed, Union Bank of India has launched on July 8, 2022 its metaverse lounge by a tie-up with Tech Mahindra. SBI is close to getting into metaverse space.
Metaverse projects are still small, between $1million and $5 million at present. Margins though are higher.
HCL expects XR to scale up in time to come.