Despite the metaverse hype, a Colombian court hosted a legal trial in the metaverse on February 15. Is this the first of many tangible use cases?

Hoping to experiment again with virtual reality (VR), Columbia is among the first to test real legal proceedings in a virtual courtroom where participants, including Magistrate Maria Quinones Triana in black legal robes, appeared as their avatars for the two-hour hearing.

“Amazing. It felt more real than a video call [on Zoom],” said Quinones and added that the case will now proceed partly in the metaverse, potentially including the verdict as the authorities hope to make the digital spaces feel more lifelike with immersive VR.

However, public policy professor at Colombia’s University of Rosario, Juan David Gutierrez feels the use of the metaverse in legal proceedings has a long way to go.

“You need a hardware to do this that very few people have. And that prompts questions about accessibility to justice and equality,” he told Reuters.

While a few have experimented with the metaverse—a space that Meta, Microsoft and other tech giants such as HCLTech are racing to build, popular brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike have already been focusing on metaverse-driven marketing as this became one of the largest virtual marketing platforms during the pandemic.

What is HCLTech Metafinity doing

1. Metafinity—built on top of HCLTech XRStudio solution—enables users to develop metaverse use cases—for the financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, hi-tech, manufacturing, and life sciences and healthcare verticals—in real time.
2. The solution is a repository of pre-built components, 3D models, connectors, MMO, prebuilt algorithms and capabilities such as avatar customization, security, meta-analytics and integrations.
3. Using HCLTech blockchain platform CoTrust™ and tokenization solution OBOL as the underlying decentralized capability, it delivers an end-to-end metaverse solution for enterprise needs.
4. It delivers domain-centric capabilities on metaverse platforms in collaboration with Adobe and various other industry-proven platforms, like SAP and Salesforce.
5. It enables enterprises to deliver extended reality experiences at scale with reduced time to market and optimizes cost.

“With our flagship startup ecosystem innovation platform and program eSTiP™, we are actively collaborating with startups working in the metaverse space to co-create value, leveraging an open innovation model.

“Besides our significant investment in R&D of AR/VR through our digital platforms, data, cloud and IoT services, we are also investing in bringing a complete ecosystem of Web 3.0 and decentralized apps that will empower the future decentralized enterprises and realize metaverse leveraging capabilities such as blockchain, tokenization, smart contracts and decentralized identity,” said Virender Singh, AVP, Digital Experience Platforms, HCLTech, in a recent article.