11.8.22-Tokyo-Showcase-iQ3Connect

ALI MERCHANT: So my name is Ali Merchant. I'm the CEO and founder of iQ3 Connect. I'd like to thank ILP and Keizai Koho Center for giving us this opportunity to speak about the industrial metaverse and the iQ3 Connect technology that is enabling companies to use the metaverse for business efficiency and sustainability. I got my master's and PhD at MIT. I worked in developing 3D technologies for simulation that I used in the aerospace industry, as well as for education in universities.

So we're very glad that COVID is kind of behind us and we are all here in person. But it has accelerated remote and hybrid work, as you heard in the last talk here. But that creates substantial challenges for businesses that have global operations, distributed teams, suppliers and customers.

And here's why, because this is what collaboration looks like. The picture on the left, it's a flat screen. And while it works for many industries and applications, it just doesn't work to take a lot of the hands-on in-person activities that industrial companies do for product development, training, customer support, and so on, and virtualizing them. And that's the opportunity that the metaverse gives us.

It's a 3D spatial environment that allows us to take these in-person interactions and the opportunity to move them to a much faster, cheaper remote environment. But it's not that easy, because for industrial applications, the data is very large and complex. The interactions have to be very accurate.

So to make this meaningful, if you're remotely training somebody between the US and, let's say, Japan, two dozen trainees, that has to be very fast and easy and reliable to really deliver the business value. And that's very challenging. And then you have to worry about the security of your IP, if you're going to talk about the metaverse and collaboration within your enterprises as well as across enterprise boundaries.

So these are some of the challenges. This is the problem space that iQ3 is in. And this is kind of the reason why we exist. And what we are doing is we are developing solutions with our partners, customers, and technology based on research done at MIT to solve some of these really hard problems. So one of the areas that we make it really easy is for companies, for enterprises to onboard their existing digital content.

This is a really hard problem that is a huge cost and makes this whole metaverse deployment and scaling very, very expensive. And then we also make it very easy for companies, for anybody within your organization, to then build these virtual experiences and deploy them without the need for any kind of coding or 3D expertise. And our technology also makes it easy, optimizes the performance of the VR/AR devices and your laptops and tablets, so that that opens up a range of possibilities to use this in very practical applications, ranging from product development, manufacturing, training, customer support, and so on.

And we make it so easy that it becomes almost like a Zoom meeting where you don't need to install anything. There are no downloads. It works in a web browser, and all you have to do is send somebody a link and they can join your collaborative workspace. And so, if you open up a collaborative workspace, this is what it looks like. So you can ignore the very simple avatars. But what this does is it allows people to collaborate from their own perspective.

And this is a completely different way, a very fast and productive collaboration, something that you cannot do on a flat screen, a Zoom or Webex-like meeting. And now you can use the same. So you can use this for assembly training for a lot of manufacturing virtual builds and so on, saving a tremendous amount of time and cost that today goes in in-person meetings.

And here's another example where you can see the scale and the perspective that you can bring with these same virtual spaces. And these can be done in a matter of seconds. You can invite people from anywhere in the world. And they can collaborate and work together.

And here you can see the different perspectives, yeah, from somebody that's a couple of hundred feet above. And it looks really tiny below. So this is something that you cannot achieve in a 2D flat screen environment. And this is another great example of bringing a realistic training environment, where it could be a very hazardous situation, into a completely safe and very inexpensive virtual environment.

And you can also enjoy the beautiful sunset in iQ3. So here's a real example of a company that we're working with. They make very complex sub-sea equipment that works thousands of feet below the ocean. And it has to work for decades very, very reliably.

And because of all these challenges that we have solved, they are able to use iQ3 for very fast Zoom-like meetings and makes them very, very fast collaboration for manufacturing, product development, training, as well as for showcasing their product lines on the web with just a simple click. So in Japan, we are very excited to be here and engage with industries that are looking for new collaboration technologies.

We have started a journey with Myrtos that was started by the former President of SolidWorks Japan, who is well known for bringing new technologies into Japan, and Kinden and Yokogawa Bridge, that are new customers for iQ3. And today the iQ3 platform is available. You can license it today. We offer free trials and we can engage with you and your companies.

And we are looking for opportunities to do software pilots, technology development to look at new applications, as well as regional business partnerships, to bring iQ3 into the Japanese market. Please come and visit us and have a live experience after this event. Look forward to speaking to you. Thank you.