There’s more the metaverse than just social media, the CEO of Qualcomm said in an interview this week.
“The metaverse is going to develop as a number of different opportunities,” Cristiano Amon told CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “You’re always going to have the big social network, consumer play. You’re going to have a big one for gaming, but industrial is big.”
Amon said that underlines the import of his company’s work with Microsoft, which uses Qualcomm chips in its mixed reality smart glasses.
At CES earlier this year, Qualcomm announced an expansion of this collaboration. With software from both companies, and a custom augmented reality Snapdragon chip, the two tech firms are developing next-generation, lightweight AR glasses.
“We’ve been talking for years about the possibility of having wearable augmented reality devices that will gain scale,” Amon said at the time. “I’m very excited about this partnership. It’s a step in making that a reality and gaining more and more scale with augmented reality.”
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The metaverse began to boom in popularity recently following Facebook’s announcement that it was changing its name to Meta Platforms and making significant investments into interactive virtual worlds. Gaming companies and social media players followed suit.
But in his interview on CNBC, Amon stressed that the potential goes beyond gaming or social cues, because cloud computing adoption has expanded across the enterprise landscape.
“With the cloud economy we have right now, with everything connected to the cloud, we have digital twins of everything. You can have a digital twin of a car, for example,” Amon said.
“When the car shows up at the dealership and somebody is going to look under the hood, they can put a virtual reality, augmented reality device, and it will tell you from the digital twin in the cloud, where to fix it, where’s the problem,” he said.
