It’s the world’s first project for a thermal comfort group
San Bonifacio (Verona), 14 July 2022 - Ferroli, a historic Verona-based company active in home and professional thermal comfort, lands in the Metaverse thanks to a project that aims to accelerate the Group's commitment to sustainability, enabling a reduction in CO2 emissions through employee mobility.
The project, born from a collaboration with Lenovo and Hevolus Innovation, is named Metaverso@Ferroli and relies on the opportunities offered by Hevolus' hVerse platform to create Ferroli's first Metaverse in Web 4.0.
Landing in the Metaverse will enable the Group to accelerate its corporate sustainability strategies by reducing the CO2 emitted through employees' mobility to attend meetings. Secondly, the project enhances Ferroli's brand awareness. Furthermore, virtualising meetings will increase employees' efficiency and reduce downtimes.
The project
The Ferroli Metaverse will be a virtual relationship space in extended reality, created ad hoc for the Veronese company, choosing a design with a contemporary architectural vocabulary and strong visual impact. Immersed in an uncontaminated green landscape, it will consist of two experiential environments: a virtual museum room, where you can discover the 3D digital twins of the iconic design objects that have marked the history of the Veronese company; and a collaborative conference room, for remote interactive meetings – one-to-one or with multiple participants.
The experience begins by creating and customising a photorealistic avatar, which, once in the Metaverse, will be to all intents and purposes the user's 3D alias: it will be able to speak multiple languages, thanks to simultaneous translation functions, walk, move its limbs, access the functional menu with head-tracking, and much more.
In short, a kind of Fortnite, where there are no enemies to fight, but rather colleagues to talk to, collaborate with and work on projects, and customers to present products to.
As in the mixed reality projects already developed by Hevolus for customers such as Natuzzi and Würth Italia, in Ferroli's Metaverso it will also be possible to organise collaborative meetings, carry out remoteassisted training activities for customers and employees, make presentations in augmented reality, show videos and images on virtual giant screens, present new products through an interactive digital twin, and share projects.
Into the Metaverse
"With the Metaverse project we are once again treading the path of innovation, the first one in our industry to adopt the advanced technology of Lenovo's latest generation of smartglasses", emphasises Riccardo Garrè, Ferroli’s Corporate CEO. "As with all the technological innovations that Ferroli has been the first to launch in the last two years in the heating and home comfort industry, we are eager and enthusiastic to explore the technological opportunities offered by the Metaverse. The new project is perfectly in line with the sustainability and continuous reduction of the environmental impact of the business, which for Ferroli is evolving exponentially and requires a careful balancing of social, environmental and industrial needs". Garrè also reminds that “Ferroli's shareholders are engaged in a competitive process to maximize the company’s value, appreciated by the market, based on the signals received so far”.
Thanks to integrated cloud technologies, the Ferroli Metaverse is inclusive and accessible to everyone via web, through common browsers, using any fixed or mobile device. In order to offer the possibility of a totalising customer experience in AR/XR, the Metaverso@Ferroli project is also ready for the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses, with which it is possible to enter metaverse environments in immersive mode, thanks to the integrated Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 processor and the use - for the first time worldwide in an enterprise context - of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Spaces platform, of which Hevolus is among global early adopters.
“Building the Enterprise Metaverse takes sustained efforts from innovative industry leaders and their solution partners,” said Vishal Shah, GM of XR and Metaverse, at Lenovo. “We are proud to work with Ferroli and Hevolus to help create an AR solution that not only transforms worker productivity but also significantly contributes to the reuduction of CO2 emmions. Lenovo's open and secure ThinkReality platform helps our customers scale into a diverse set of metaverse applications.”
"We are delighted that Ferroli has chosen Hevolus for this important project, strengthening an already long-established partnership"-said Antonio Squeo, CIO of Hevolus Innovation. "The initiative once again demonstrates the value of our offering, which sees hVERSE as the first platform worldwide to create metaverses autonomously. The potential of this tool is enormous, not only from the point of view of creating new business opportunities, but also of sustainable innovation. The accessibility and scalability provided by our platform means that the metaverse can be used by everyone via the Web as well. On the other hand, eventually, the ability to meet in the metaverse in an enterprise context-and thus not just for fun-will play a strategic role in easing the polluting impact of business organizations on the Earth's ecosystem, helping to reduce costs and CO2 emissions related to transportation and data storage."
Ferroli's commitment to sustainability
The Metaverse will incorporate an ad hoc system to measure the reduction in CO2 emissions resulting from the remote use of digital technologies for production, training and collaboration activities, including complex ones.
Although it is well known that digital devices have a significant impact on the environment, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Indeed, thanks to the digital revolution, travel can be reduced, thus cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, digitalizing activities makes it possible to dematerialise processes and give substance to the decarbonisation process.
Ferroli has long been at the forefront of innovation, focusing on technologies to reduce environmental impact and accelerate the energy transition. On 21 June 2022, the Group officially inaugurated its new Research & Development Centre, created to generate efficient and environmentally friendly systems and project the multinational thermal comfort company into the future. A future that will see increasingly sustainable products, heat pumps with natural refrigerants, with almost zero environmental impact, and hydrogen boilers.
Ferroli's historical expertise in combustion and burners has made it possible to equip the new laboratory for the testing and development of new green gas products, in particular pure and mixed hydrogen in various forms.
The total weight of eco-friendly renewable energy products, as a percentage of the Group's overall turnover, increased from 17.5% in 2020 to 22.5% in 2021 and 36% in the first four months of 2022.
The partnership with Hevolus had already produced a tangible result: Ferroli introduced augmented reality some time ago to allow installers to carry out a virtual inspection aimed at presenting to potential customers a qualified offer. The system allows the installer to make the work more efficient without having to visit the customer's home. Once again, in short, the technology reduces travel and CO2 emissions, while saving time.
