A Metaverse Landscape - The Industrial Metaverse

We continue our short series on the metaverse landscape, with a look in a little more detail on our definition of the Industrial Metaverse.  

The Industrial Metaverse is focused on optimizing industries’ production processes and operations. It aims to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve product quality by enabling businesses to simulate and optimize their manufacturing and supply chains in a virtual environment.

The industrial metaverse simulates real-world systems, utilizing technologies and approaches such as digital twins, AI, extended reality, blockchain, as well as cloud and edge computing to create a powerful interface between real and digital worlds.

Through allowing businesses and organizations to model, prototype, and test design iterations, the industrial metaverse enables digital real-world problem solving, focusing on purpose driven use cases aligned with real-world challenges and business needs. 

The Industrial Metaverse is especially useful when dealing with situations that would be expensive, hazardous, dangerous, difficult or even impossible to recreate in the real world.

Examples would be recent investigations into the Pylos ferry disaster, which used a 3D reenactment of events just before the boat sank, the use of digital twins in engineering or usage in medical research and training.

Digital twins are perhaps the most interesting approach - being virtual representations of real world constructions, objects or processes used to model products, factories or supply chains.

Linked in some cases to their physical counterparts, these digital twins can model future events by continuously sharing data with the real world constructions or processes. In this way, experimental changes can be made in real time with much lower levels of risk and cost.

Failures in process or parts can be anticipated and proactively prevented, while new processes can be prototyped and virtually tested.

BMW in partnership with NVIDIA have created clones of physical factories for planning their complex manufacturing systems, whilst NASA created a digital version of its Perseverance Mars rover before the actual mission, to help predict issues and reduce potential of mission failure.

The Industrial Metaverse can also significantly help design prototyping. Engineers can render photorealistic, 3D representations of objects such as products or buildings within the metaverse to offer an unparalleled level of understanding.

Faster innovation cycles, immersive product testing, decentralized production which connect physical and digital worlds will transform the world of engineering and development across industries of all types. 

While Everdome does not see itself immediately specializing in the industrial metaverse sector, the potential for realistic Mars and space exploration experiences within our destination is clear.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series, where we take a deeper look at ideas around the Educational metaverse.

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