What is the Infosys Metaverse Foundry and why does it exist?

After Infosys launched their Metaverse Foundry this week to help facilitate and accelerate businesses’ metaverse strategies, Technology Magazine examines what the Foundry is and how it could assist businesses.

Alongside the expertise of Infosys’ technology and design experts, the Metaverse Foundry gives clients the opportunity to build on hundreds of ready-to-apply live use cases, as industry races to construct metaverse environments through advanced AI-powered simulations.

Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, said, “The physical and virtual worlds are already smoothly and ubiquitously interwoven. The metaverse will deepen this overlap and in very experiential ways that will create abundant space for business innovation. We want to help our clients to quickly double down on those opportunities in a find-fast, learn-faster environment before they can reorient their own capabilities, processes and culture in-house to respond to this rapidly evolving space.”

What is the Metaverse Foundry?

Essentially the collective knowledge of Infosys' business domains combined with expertise in immersive, interactive and experiential design; the Foundry helps enterprises to work through use cases, business cases and execution roadmaps.

Utilising such technologies as AR/VR, Blockchain, NFT, IoT, Applied AI, cybersecurity and 5G, clients will be able to explore the value of the metaverse in a variety of ways. 

As an example of the templates available comes from the realm of e-commerce, where enterprises can explore a branded metaverse environment where they browse items and even buy them through NFTs (non-fungible tokens) so that they are delivered in the physical world as real items. 

Any use cases already in existence?

The Infosys Metaverse Foundry has set up digital avatars in conjunction with the French Tennis Federation for Roland Garros (The French Open), enabling fans to engage with one another during the tournament. They could use virtual objects and speak to each other's avatars in this space.

Also on the tennis theme, Infosys have partnered with Tennis Australia at the Australian Open, and you can see the results of this extended reality store and fan experience here. 

Korey Allchin, Director of Partnership & International Business, Tennis Australia, said, “For the first time at any Grand Slam, in 2021 Infosys helped us reimagine the shopping experience at the Australian Open, by offering our fans an extended reality store. They made it possible for tennis fans to shop for all their favorite items including tees, beach towels, caps and racquets in this virtual world, and then carry these back to the real world. Seamless digital-physical connects have become more and more important in the evolution of our fan experience. At the same time, during the pandemic when travel was very restricted, Infosys helped us create the AO 2021 Virtual Hub, a digital platform targeted at our business partners where we took content and experiences from the event to the comfort of their homes and offices all around the world.”

In academia, the Infosys Wingspan platform has supported Infosys' global corporate university, opening up virtual spaces for learning for educators and students.

Infosys Living Labs’ multi-tiered digital infrastructure

The Infosys Living Labs are comprised of various technologies, processes and people and platforms to accelerate and build solutions and immersive experiences.

Not only can a business create engaging environments and digital replicas, but they can also facilitate the integration with enterprise data APIs and 360/3D asset management systems.

In order to drive simulations, AI and engineering platforms are on hand to help build digital twins of complex physical objects.

Using the Infosys XR platform, a leading pharmaceutical created a digital twin of their vaccine lab, that enabled quality engineers to access critical vaccine culture data to make predictions and decisions. 

Bridging the physical and digital world

As a makerspace to bridge the physical-digital worlds, enterprises can collaborate with any creator-partner in the Infosys Innovation Ecosystem.

The value-add is that they can manage the pilot-to-production ramp up smoothly and add more choices at the prototype stage to de-risk and future-proof investments.

Microsoft Azure, a long-standing partner to Infosys, helped scale a new metaverse capability for a construction client. An engineering consulting company prototyped an immersive mixed reality workbench to inspect prospective engineering construction sites, which were rendered as rich 3D assets. 

To find out more about this incredible new digital playground, see this video.