Suzie Kim, left, country manager of Unity Technologies Korea, and Kim Seon-jeong, CTO of LG CNS, pose for a photo after the two companies signed a partnership in this photo on Thursday. Courtesy of LG CNS

By Baek Byung-yeul

LG CNS has forged a partnership with U.S.-based game engine maker Unity Technologies so that the two sides will perform businesses in emerging metaverse businesses such as virtual offices, virtual factories and virtual distribution, they said Thursday.

LG CNS is the IT service arm of LG Group. Recently, the company has been concentrating on digital transformation-related business activities.

It said it signed a Global Platinum Authorized Channel Partnership, saying this is the first time that Unity has signed the partnership with a Korean company. The platinum rating is a qualification granted only to companies that have a large number of digital transformation-related experts and operate a sales professional organization with their own digital transformation businesses, LG CNS said.

"To have the platinum partnership, Unity's partners need to be able to apply Unity's new services to customers and have enough capability to provide technical support," LG CNS said. Through this partnership, the two companies will innovate their customer experience with metaverse services such as virtual factories, virtual logistics and metaverse offices.

LG CNS has built up its relevant experiences as it has built smart factories for LG affiliates. Virtual Factory technology can run a factory operation in a virtual space. LG CNS also established logistics centers for customers such as Coupang, SSG and Market Kurly and has the largest share of the logistics automation market.

Using Unity's 3D engine, LG CNS will virtualize the space and facilities of manufacturing facilities. By linking various data of factories to the virtual space, the company will establish a metaverse environment, enabling it to predict facility failures and optimize its manufacturing processes.

For the virtual logistics business, LG CNS will establish a virtual logistics center using Unity's engine. Also, in a metaverse office, virtualized using Unity's platform, customers will be able to perform various business activities such as video conferencing with more than 1,000 participants. LG CNS plans to apply the metaverse service to its in-house office first and will later expand the service to its customers.

LG CNS CTO Kim Seon-jeong said, "We will innovate the customer experience in smart factory, smart logistics and metaverse and lead the ecosystem in collaboration with Unity, the world's No.1 company in the 3D platform industry."

Suzie Kim, country manager of Unity Technologies Korea, also said "By providing our technological capability, which is used to build a metaverse ecosystem globally, to LG CNS so that our partner will be able to build an advanced metaverse environment for its AI, digital twin, big data and cloud computing businesses."