Realworld-one Metaverse

After the Ph.D. I felt that my time in the academic world was done, and I wanted to do more meaningful things in life. The first real full-time job in the industry was with realworld-one (yes, lowecased), a Germany-based spin-off of the more famous IKA. RWO, as it’s called among friends, wanted to create a sort of “metaverse” – I dislike the word and prefer to call it just a hub – where companies from different scientific and industrial fields could share their products, network, and most importantly where they could have private rooms to do training and showcasing of their products in a secure and interactive environment.

A virtual or augmented reality environment where a group of avatars is seated in an auditorium-like setting. The avatars are facing a large screen that displays an image of two people, one of whom is holding a virtual reality headset. The setting appears to be a virtual conference or presentation. The text 'realworld one' is visible in the upper right corner of the image. The auditorium has a modern design with wooden floors and curved seating arrangements. The avatars are diverse in appearance, suggesting a varied audience.

Joining them in 2021, for my first year with them I took care of creating different rooms for third party customers, building experiences that went from advanced biochemical hazard training to product comparison between different brands. After that, given my interest in tools development, I was paired with a back-end programmer to test the idea of standardizing some of our content. We worked for a few months on a guiding system that would automatically create diegetic UI for our training sessions. The experiment went so well that from there we expanded the team into the so-called”standardization team”, that was tasked with reviewing all the rooms on the platform to identify, isolate, refactor and share on a perforce stream the ones that could be reused across multiple scenarios.

A laboratory setting with various scientific instruments and equipment on a workbench. A person is interacting with a virtual interface using augmented reality (AR) glasses. The AR interface displays various numerical data and measurements related to the equipment on the bench. The laboratory is well-lit with a blue color scheme, and the AR interface overlays the real-world environment, providing additional information and control options. The numerical values displayed on the AR interface range from 1600 to 3.0, along with an 'OK' status

As you may imagine the work we did there was covered by very strict NDAs, and I can’t say more than this. But you can trust me, it was really really cool!