At the 2022 Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, Unanimous AI and Agora World announced an exciting partnership to bring the Swarm software environment into the Metaverse. This partnership allows users within Agora World to amplify their collective intelligence to produce more accurate forecasts, reach better decisions, and optimize collaboration in virtual environments. From students to business teams to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the powerful combination of Swarm AI and VR is unlocking the future of virtual teamwork.
What Is Swarm AI?
Swarm AI is based on swarm intelligence, the phenomenon behind why birds flock, bees swarm, and fish gather in schools. Members of these groups interact as real-time collaborative systems that communicate with each other and converge on an optimal decision. For example, an individual honey bee, which has about 100,000 times fewer neurons than a human, communicates with thousands of other honey bees in order to select an optimal location for a new nest, balancing many competing variables like sunlight, temperature, protection, and flower proximity.
With Unanimous AI’s software, humans can also form such groups, leveraging the power of swarm intelligence to reach decisions or make predictions with far more accuracy than traditional methods like voting or polling. Rigorous research has proven this: In the past, the platform has allowed sports fans to turn $20 into $11,000 by correctly betting on the outcomes of horse races, radiologists to reduce the error rate of medical diagnoses by 36%, UN members to more accurately predict food shortages in developing countries, and much more.
Swarm AI Use Cases
Facilitating Distributed Collaboration
This software becomes even more powerful when brought into the Metaverse, which Agora World helps democratize by providing businesses and creators the no-code tools needed to create virtual spaces. We all know how difficult it can be to coordinate a remote team, sending messages back and forth for even the simplest tasks, like scheduling a meeting. By using Swarm AI in a VR environment, remote business teams can leverage swarm intelligence to quickly make better decisions.
The partnership between Unanimous AI and Agora World is kickstarting a highly disruptive way of virtual collaboration for groups. “As business teams migrate into the Metaverse, the need for making fast and accurate group decisions inside virtual worlds becomes increasingly important,” said Dr. Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous AI. “By partnering with Agora World, we are ensuring that the power of Swarm AI is available in rich immersive spaces where people are congregating and collaborating.”
“Now organizations can get together in a virtual conference room and have face-to-face conversations while ‘swarming’ on a virtual screen before them,” says Rosenberg. “This is what enterprise customers want — the ability to have groups of consumers get together in the Metaverse and review virtual products like small consumer goods to cars and trucks and even houses — and then generate accurate insights by using Swarm in real time.”
This powerful combination of technologies isn’t just for business teams. Public workers, legislators, friends in social settings, artists and their fan bases, teachers and their students, fund managers or crowdfunders, and developers doing user testing of VR experiences all benefit from being able to run the Swarm platform within a VR environment. As more industries and tasks migrate to the Metaverse, Swarm AI will play an increasingly important role in facilitating distributed collaboration.
Market Research
Another use case is for market research. Focus groups can interact with products in the Metaverse, such as the Coke can or car as pictured in the above image, and engage with the Swarm software to generate useful intelligence for marketers. Doing this research online allows companies to gather far more data, while VR ensures that interactions retain authenticity and users feel more present.
DAOs
Another exciting application is for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). These are digitally-native teams that use blockchain to regulate decision-making and governance to reach diverse goals, including maintaining open Web3 projects, investing funds collected from the members, or even pooling money to buy an original copy of the U.S. Constitution. Swarm AI implemented into VR can enable these teams to improve their decisions while respecting the various perspectives better than simple voting methods, regardless of where their members are located.
Final Thoughts
Unanimous AI is planning to promote Agora World to other businesses that want to generate AI-optimized user insights in virtual spaces. “Over time we expect other virtual platforms to integrate support for Swarm, especially platforms that are serious about getting business teams to collaborate in the metaverse,” says Rosenberg.
These are the early days for both Swarm AI and VR. This combination of technologies will obviously become far more potent as each improves. As the Swarm platform is refined and VR gains fidelity, this method of digital collaboration will produce results and decisions that are an order of magnitude better than those provided by simple polling.
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