2022-Korea-Showcase-iQ3Connect

SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE] training platform [INAUDIBLE] want an iQ3Connect.

ALI MERCHANT: Hello, everyone. Can you hear me? So my name is Ali Merchant. I'm the CEO and founder of iQ3Connect. I'd first like to thank MIT ILP and all the member companies for this opportunity to speak briefly about the industrial metaverse and the iQ3Connect technology that is helping enterprises to leverage the metaverse for operational efficiency and sustainability.

My connection to MIT is that I got my Master's and PhD in the Department of Aeronautics. I've worked on 3D technology-- 3D design and simulation tools that are now part of some of the foundation of the iQ3Connect platform. So we're all glad that COVID is behind us and we are all meeting here in person, but for global enterprises, the remote collaboration is still a challenge because they have distributed workforces that they have to train and work together.

They have suppliers and customers that are all over the world. And this is what collaboration looks like on a flat screen. It just-- it works for many industries, but for virtualizing many of the activities around product development, training, and customer support, it's just nearly impossible to virtualize such activities. And the metaverse, I'm going to just make a very simple definition here, is a new mode of communicating and collaborating in 3D and spatial and real-time environments that completely changed the way we can-- that something that you cannot do on a flat, 2D screen.

And so if we can take some of these in-person meetings and industrial activities and virtualize them, it can offer tremendous cost savings, productivity, and efficiencies in an industrial enterprise. But it's not that easy. There are a number of business and technical challenges to make this work at scale and operationalize it in a business environment.

So what we see is social and sort of consumer metaverse, the requirements are very different, and you can use low fidelity content. But for industrial applications, the requirements are much more rigorous. There's a lot of complex 3D content. The interactions have to be very accurate, and the collaboration, the in-person 3D collaboration, has to work almost instantaneously.

As you can see here, imagine a remote trainer that is training technicians halfway around the world, and this has to work very well to really deliver business value. And you can see some of the activities around product design, manufacturing, training, and customer support that could be brought into this virtual metaverse environment. And so what we're doing at iQ3 is really working on these hard problems and developing solutions with customers, partners, and technology based on research done at MIT.

So the first thing we are doing is making onboarding of this complex, 3D digital content extremely easy across an enterprise. So you can bring it on board, and then anyone in your organization can use that for creating virtual experiences, for training, for product development, for customer support. And the other thing we are doing is with all of this complex data, we are able to optimize it with our technology that makes the whole VR, AR, and basically using any device far more practical and usable.

And by doing that, you can use it for a range of activities like product development, training, customer support, and many other activities that can be very restricted for industrial applications. And so we've made-- with this approach, we've made it kind of almost as easy as Zoom. So you can just click on a link and enter these metaverse environments for all of these industrial activities. And finally, we made the platform work with the security and all of the business, IP, and integration requirements to work smoothly in a business environment.

So one of our customers that I like to talk about is an oil and gas company with more than 80,000 employees around the world. And having saw these problems, they selected iQ3 as a collaboration platform. And they're able to use this just as a Zoom meeting for manufacturing collaboration, for virtual training, virtual showcasing of their product lines in VR just with a simple web link and a click to enter these metaverse-like spaces.

And in Korea, we see opportunities to engage with industrial enterprises and software partners looking for next generation collaboration technologies. And we also have a very successful collaboration with LG Nova, and we are top 10 winner in the Nova program. And we also we're working with LG US to transform in-person training into this kind of remote, 3D metaverse training that can be cost efficiently scaled across multiple product lines. And as you can see, we are-- today, we are focused on training, education, product design, and manufacturing, but there are many other applications that our customers are already exploring including sales and marketing.

So with iQ3's platform, we are successfully-- it's being deployed in a production environment. We are licensing the platform today, and we're looking-- we are seeking new customers and partnerships for software pilots, technology development, and regional business partnerships to introduce iQ3 to the Korean market. Please stop by our table to see a live demo and really experience iQ3 live. Thank you very much.