Maxar Technologies’ Dan Nord, SVP & GM of Enterprise Earth Intelligence, delivered a keynote at the GeoIgnite Conference on March 1st that started by sounding familiar notes about Maxar’s past and present. But it transitioned to a surprising future: one where Maxar’s imagery becomes the key basis for the so-called “Metaverse.”
It started with information that would be familiar to most attendees of a geospatial imaging conference. He discussed Maxar’s use of both multispectral and synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites to provide an enormous amount of imagery (petabytes worth) to a wide variety of clients in both the private and public sectors, including both wide-scale imaging and focused spotlight imaging.
He said that “almost any satellite imagery you see on your phone came from us” used in applications like Google Maps every day, and that their work with government clients means that a lot of businesses and consumers that rely on satellite imagery might not even be aware that they’re benefiting from Maxar’s work. Maxar’s satellite imagery has become ubiquitous in everyday life.
The “real-life Metaverse”
When Nord transitioned to Maxar’s upcoming work, however, he shifted to a more dramatic, speculative tone.
Nord made a point of talking about his history in the video game industry, particularly helping Amazon build up their game development studios, and how it helped prepare him to lead Maxar into “the 3D world”. He said that Maxar has recently purchased 3D analytics firm Vricon (a $140m buyout according to CNBC). The combination of Maxar’s petabytes of imagery and Vricon’s algorithms has allowed Maxar to begin to create “full-resolution, high-resolution precision 3D” representations of their satellite imagery, working towards creating a “80 million square kilometers of precision 3D…a full global-scale simulation”
Nord then proposed the logical next question: what would they do with a 3D simulation of the world? His answer: to create a “real-world Metaverse”. He said that immersive simulations will be “the next way to consume information”, citing the growing popularity of 3D headsets like Meta’s “Quest 2”. He grants that it’s still primitive right now, but he believes that it will keep growing, that “every industry will have an immersive experience”.
In this virtual representation, “everything in the real world that needs to be accurate or global in scale…is going to need a 3D version of the world”. So any kind of virtual or augmented reality application will need accurate representations of the environment around users in order to be usable. “That image processing will use imagery as a base map.”
(He also pointed to the gaming industry as a potentially key client, saying that “a global scale simulation is really exciting” for game makers.)
He closed by saying that the future of Maxar is “geospatial reference”. Maxar will be a key part of a future “stack of middleware that represents the truth about our world”, allowing people to build applications on top of it that are “true, accurate, and global-scale”.
Q&A brings out more Metaverse info, Mars and Moon speculation
A Q&A exchange between Nord and GoGeomatics Managing Director Jonathan Murphy revealed that one of those applications will likely be education. A metaverse-based form of distance education could be far superior to the kind that we’ve grown familiar with since spring 2020, with applications like virtual travel potentially enriching in-person schooling as well.
Another question asked where they’ll be creating this 3D imagery, and Nord said that “they have to be very deliberate about where we create our 3D”, and so there will be less 3D in places like “the oceans or the north and south poles, with higher granularity around cities and other places that are interesting”.
A question about pricing for small- and mid-sized companies was met with a response that they’re looking into value-trades and joint ventures, but his ultimate goal is that “Maxar delivers imagery the same way that Amazon delivers web servers, where imagery is accessible and easy to get to, and because of automation the price will go down.”
Two other interesting questions were about whether Maxar will look into Moon- and Mars-based imagery and geospatial referencing. Nord was very clear that that was in their future, saying “once we’re mining on the Moon, we’ll need the imagery to figure out where the precious metals are, and multispectral imagery can actually go and hint where the heavy metals are”. He said that they may now have enough imagery to start creating a 3D base map of Mars. Nord also pointed to the Psyche mission to the asteroid 16 Pysche, and Maxar’s role in it, as an example of one non-earth-focused Maxar observation mission.