German engineering and technology firm Siemens has teamed up with chip maker Nvidia to launch a metaverse where companies can reduce the cost of running their plants and accelerate new production designs.
As Reuters reported Wednesday (June 29), the agreement is the foundation of Siemens Xcelerator, the company’s new open, cloud-based digital platform, aimed at expanding the company’s digital business.
“Siemens Xcelerator will make it easier than ever before for companies to navigate digital transformation — faster and at scale,” CEO Chief Executive Roland Busch said in a statement.
Learn more: Qualcomm Opens $100M Metaverse Fund
Siemens, which purchased Brightly Software for $1.58 billion earlier this week, is delving deeper into the digital space because it offers faster growth rates and higher margins than its longtime business of trains and industrial drives and automation, Reuters said.
The company says Xcelerator is an umbrella term for services that let customers visualize projects before construction begins.
“We can essentially replace having to build a thing in the real world first,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software.
He added that the platform ensures products “are going to work well before we commit to building them in the real world when it becomes really expensive and difficult to change.”
As Reuters notes, these are just two companies at work in the metaverse, a shared virtual platform where people can interact in digital environments.
See also: China’s Tencent Holdings Launches Metaverse Division
Earlier this week, China’s Tencent Holdings launched an “extended reality” (XR) unit to tap into the burgeoning metaverse by creating new software and hardware for the tech giant’s business and entertainment group.
And in March, Wireless technology firm Qualcomm created a $100 million fund to invest in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tech to help kickstart the metaverse.
The Snapdragon Metaverse Fund is designed to empower “developers and companies of all sizes as they push boundaries of what’s possible as we enter into this new generation of spatial computing,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement.
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