How the massive metaverse looks to a German VR startup

VRdirect co-founder Rolf Illenberger is heading from Munich, Germany, to Las Vegas in early January to promote the virtual reality software startup’s programs to B2B customers and media.

“Metaverse will be one of the top topics at CES,” he told Fierce Electronics  in a Zoom interview.  With VR at an inflection point, “2022 will be amazing in terms of growth.”
VRdirect offers a VR platform for enterprises. They use the software to coordinate creation of their own VR content to be used in various applications, including safety training and  on-boarding for new employees.



In addition to co-founding VRdirect in 2019, Illenberger is also managing director of the 18-person company. He counts as  customers Siemens,  Porsche, Lufthansa  and Nestle.  Nestle is expected to begin rolling out 10,000 VR headsets in 2022 relying on centralized software.
With the variety of VR hardware platforms announced or expected from Meta, Microsoft, Google, HTC and Apple, among others, “it’s just going to be crazy,” he said. There could be as many as 10 VR ecosystems -- and multiple metaverses -- for enterprise IT shops to sort through.
 “We are trying to be a solution for that,” Illenberger said. “Our core philosophy is to be as open as possible to the platforms, but the reality is the big tech guys are playing their own game of who’s going to rule the metaverse world. Nobody wants to standardize because they are competing.”
Illenberger sees the VR opportunity as enormous, not only for B2B, but also for B2C with gaming and other entertainment opportunities.  “The metaverse will be much bigger than the smartphone has been,” he said. “The opportunity for the big tech guys is much bigger than it was in the smartphone era.”
2022 will be such a big year for VR partly because of Meta’s promotion of the tech, but more recently because Intel and Nvidia have talked about the incredible amount of processing power, and semiconductors, needed to support growth in the sector.

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