EP.49: Into The Metaverse with Timoni West - VP & GM, Digital Twins at Unity

Joining me on this episode is Timoni West, VP & GM of Digital Twins at Unity, in what is likely one of the most fascinating conversations I had on the podcast.

Timoni is responsible for Unity’s cloud apps and services in industrial, automotive, commercial, and business markets, delivering value for customers moving into real time, simulation, reconstruction, and rendering. She runs a P&L with a team of 230+ people. Prior to this role, she was vice president of emerging tools and augmented and virtual reality, among other roles.

Timoni and I had a wide ranging conversation about virtual worlds, digital twins, ambient computing, artificial intelligence, predictive manufacturing, the future of industry, and why we’re only at the very beginning of a computing era that is smarter and more capable than we imagine.

On the metaverse:

"what we're really seeing here is that we're able to ingest massive amounts of data, often real time data, and then be able to record it, visualize it, or use it to power another device. And I think this has all kind of gotten swept up into what we're calling the metaverse today, but the old school, 1970s term was contextual computing where computers are able to take in contextual information from the world around them and able to do something cool.

On digital twins:

“with the Tyndall Air Force base, the large part of what they used our technology to do was to figure out how to make sure it did not get, Knocked down by a hurricane again because it was knocked down by a hurricane once. And hurricanes are also dangerous. So being able to not only take in the real-time information on the building site as they were building it out, but also be able to use historical data to figure out how to build the right thing in the future is I think a pretty great example of a digital twin.

https://www.intometamedia.com/