A science fiction amusement park. A nerd’s paradise. And, obviously, a window, or rather a terrace, on the future of digital technologies and therefore of humanity, because “today IT and humanity are correlated, co-dependent and influence each other”. Word of Filippo Rizzante, Chief Techology Officer of Reply. We are talking about Xchange, the annual event of Reply, the network of Italian multinational companies founded in 1996, which in 2021 had a turnover of just under 1.5 billion and in the first quarter of 2022 almost 441 million euros.
Innovation Almanac – July 2, 1996
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Specialized companies, which, explains their website, “work alongside the main industrial groups in the definition and development of business models enabled by the new technological and communication paradigms”.
At least 5,000 people, including employees and customers, crowded the Superstudio in Milan, furnished for the occasion in pure pop art style like Roy Lichstenstein, took part in the third stage, after London and Munich, of the annual Reply event. (finally in attendance after two years of pandemic), a ritual that has been celebrated since 2004 and that combines speeches and talks, presentations of the entire network of companies, at least 150, that make up the Reply network, and demonstrations of technologies, applications and products avant-garde, and even a little more.
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The perfect coffee machine
The demo area was all about Metaverse, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and robotics. Among the applications on display the machine that makes the “perfect” coffee thanks to the artificial intelligence that allows you to manage every conceivable parameter, from the roasting of the bean to the temperature of the water, all customizable for each member of the family. Expensive (one thousand euros), bulky but which obviously satisfies a need, if it is true that in the first month of launch on the market in Germany it sold 150 thousand pieces.
Rose, the avatar that replicates expressions
Augmented reality and HoloLens are the protagonists of a demo that shows how an operator can virtually handle a car seat in order to wire it correctly. And then there is Rose, who also participated in Filippo Rizzante’s plenary session: a hyper-realistic avatar who takes on anyone’s facial expressions in real time, bringing the metaverse into the physical world.
And vice versa: another application made in Microsoft, for the first time in Europe, showed how it is possible to bring ourselves into the metaverse, for example by making us participate in meetings in a virtual 3D environment.
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Literally dozens of applications of all kinds developed for and with customers from every sector.
But returning to the speech of the Cto, digital technology and in particular 3D are destined to interact more and more deeply with our lives.
The role of human-digital interactions
“If cases like that of the Japanese Kondo who married a vocaloid, the virtual rock star Atsune Miku, are extremes, it is however true that more and more people respond ‘thanks’ to Alaxa or Siri, or consider the robot vacuum cleaner as a pet. that is, human-digital interactions are increasingly replacing human-human ones “exemplifies Rizzante, according to whom,” we can no longer ignore it, without resolving crises such as the pandemic or the climate emergency is unthinkable “.
And Reply, with its fluid structure, which allows it to quickly create specialized work groups active on the most interesting trends and then transform them into group companies, has what it takes to play a leading role in the transition.
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