Mixed reality and artificial intelligence services company Touchcast has launched MCity, an enterprise metaverse where any company can deliver communication, collaboration, commerce and learning experiences.
Companies can claim their address in the metaverse by registering their .metaverse domain.
Powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, NVIDIA’s AI and Cloud GPUs, Accenture technology services and industry expertise and the Microsoft cloud, MCity is promoting the concept of metaverse-as-a-service (MaaS).
MaaS lets organisations register their .metaverse domain for free, securely set up their metaverse campus, and begin offering immersive experiences that bring people together “across time, space and language barriers”, said Touchcast.
At CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas this week, Touchcast hosted the Metaverse Summit as a hybrid experience, with more than 20 industry thought leaders. They included Andrew Wilson, Chief Digital Officer at Microsoft; Richard Kerris, Vice President, Omniverse Platform Development IGM of M&E at NVIDIA; and Bernt Kåre Johannessen, Industry Manager at Epic Games.
Wilson said:
“The metaverse will connect organisations, employees, partners and customers in a new digital realm. This universe is unfolding and Touchcast’s MCity is a great example of the metaverse coming to life, with Microsoft Teams as the first gateway”
To help enterprises begin their metaverse journey, Touchcast is collaborating with Accenture to help its clients along the way.
“With the rise of distributed commerce, employees and customers want the flexibility of hybrid working, but also a fundamentally better experience,” said Marc Carrel-Billiard, Senior Managing Director and Global Technology Innovation Lead at Accenture. “For interaction to be meaningful, it needs to go far beyond conference calling and video chats. MCity provides this richer, deeper, persistent digital experience, and Accenture will be helping its clients navigate their move to the metaverse.”
Featuring 3D, photoreal environments that were, until recently, only available to high-end games and movies, MCity leverages cloud-based rendering on the Microsoft Azure cloud, powered by NVIDIA GPUs and Maxine software.
“It will let any one of the 250m active users of Microsoft Teams be transported into a metaverse venue to meet, work, shop and learn together with others,” said Touchcast.
Currently available as an invite-only preview, MCity allows companies to migrate current workflows into the metaverse to “support a hybrid work reality”, without requiring VR headsets, high-end computers or specialised software.
MCity creates a digital twin of any corporate campus, with campuses located on their own blocks in MCity. Companies will be able to offer their services in MCity through its upcoming marketplace.
“At a time when humanity is challenged to think differently about the future of work, we need new paradigms and new tools to imagine a better way of doing things,” said Edo Segal, Founder and CEO of Touchcast.
Organisations can claim a .metaverse domain for free here. Last October, big metaverse proponent Facebook said it would create 10,000 jobs in the European Union region to accelerate its plans around virtual spaces.
