DAVOS: The future of global collaborations is being shaped by innovation and the ubiquitous embrace of immersive technologies, which continue to drive industry transformations.
For a glimpse into this future, TRENDS spoke with Chieh Huang, President of WEF’s Global Collaboration Village, during last week’s Davos meeting to discuss how VR and AR can transform collaborations and enhance global engagement.
Launched at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, the Global Collaboration Village (GCV) Next-Gen platform digitally extends the WEF’s impact. It uses immersive technology and empowers decision-makers to tackle challenges through real-time collaboration, interaction and dynamic visualization.
GCV is one of the world’s only AR platforms that facilitates real-time collaboration across different device brands, computers, and geographies—including China. Within this virtual space, a global network can learn, host events, showcase innovations, and collaborate to amplify their impact.
Excerpts from the interview:
What has been the GCV’s key objective and has it accomplished its goal?
The Global Collaboration Village is a digital extension of the World Economic Forum. We accomplished our goals. We have many more goals in the future.
At this event, we not only launched the next generation of the Global Collaboration Village, but we also now had two promenade locations where folks outside of the Congress Center could actually join a live session. Digitizing the forum, democratizing the voices, as well as the conversation, that’s our mission. I’m glad we were able to do it.
What inspired the GCV Next-Gen?
I think the wonderful thing about the Global Collaboration Village is that the inspiration was all our founders. So Professor Klaus Schwab thought many years ago that we don’t have a monopoly on the best voices and the most important voices across the world physically in Davos. Let’s actually extend that impact and bring other conversation and other voices here to the Congress Center and here to the forum.
How important is sustainability within the framework of the Village?
It’s a key message and a key issue, not only for the Village, but also for the forum in general. As you have probably experienced, this year there’s been a lot of talk about AI and sustainability, and those topics all have been covered by the Global Collaboration Village. So we created the Next Gen using and leveraging a lot of AI. Probably the most impactful sessions were hosted by our Center for Nature and Climate. So, yeah, both those topics, I think, were well covered.
What role does the village play in the key theme for the event, the collaboration in the Intelligent Age?
That is collaborating with the key stakeholders of the intelligent age in person. But then what the GCV brings and what the village brings is actually a collaboration with intelligent tools. We can’t just discuss how we collaborate in this new intelligent age without also upgrading and evolving how we collaborate. And that’s what the village does.
And how can the different stakeholders, governments around the world, as well as the private sector, social organizations use the platform to optimize the way they integrate it within their framework, and foster the dialogue?
It’s the same way or the same theme of how they leverage the World Economic Forum. At the end of the day, we are a platform to bring together public and private collaboration, and our stated mission is bettering the state of the world. If you think about the global collaboration village as a digital extension of that in partnership with Accenture and Microsoft, we wanted to extend that impact so that, again, you can collaborate between public and private organizations digitally and all year round. So it doesn’t just need to end here after this week is over in Davos.
I saw that aviation had a big part to play in that… the impact of how you’re immersed into the experience, and then you’re creating a better world.
I love how you said you’re immersed in the impact, because I think what we would love for everyone to know is that when you’re immersed in a particular subject, the impact is different, meaning that your ability to learn and to retain information, it’s just a very different experience. And so hopefully we continue to do this more and more every year, and so more and more people can have that immersive experience.
(Edited by Riyaz Wani)