The Emerging Industrial Metaverse | MIT Technology Review

Annika Hauptvogel, Head of Technology and Innovation Management at Siemens, describes the Industrial Metaverse as “immersive, giving users the feeling of being in a real environment; real-time collaboration; open enough for different applications to interact seamlessly; and the trust of the individuals and businesses that participate in it”, much more than just a digital world.

The industrial metaverse will revolutionize the way work is done, but it will also bring significant new value to businesses and societies. By enabling companies to model, prototype and test tens, hundreds or millions of design iterations in real time and in an immersive physics-based environment before committing physical and human resources to a project, the tools of the industrial metaverse will usher in a new era. solve real-world problems numerically.

“The real world is very messy, noisy, and sometimes difficult to understand,” says Danny Lange, senior vice president of artificial intelligence at Unity Technologies, a leading platform for real-time 3D content creation and growth. . “The idea of ​​the industrial metaverse is to create a cleaner connection between the real world and the virtual world, because the virtual world is so much easier and cheaper to work with.”

While the real applications of the consumer metaverse are still in development, the use cases of the industrial metaverse are goal-oriented, well-aligned with real-world problems and business imperatives. The resource efficiency enabled by metaverse industry solutions can increase business competitiveness while continuing to advance the goals of sustainability, resilience, decarbonization, and dematerialization that are essential to human flourishing.

This report explores what it will take to create the industrial metaverse, its potential impacts on business and society, the challenges ahead, and the innovative use cases that will shape the future. Its main conclusions are as follows:

• The industrial metaverse will bring together the digital and real worlds. It will enable a constant exchange of information, data and decisions and enable industries to digitally solve extraordinarily complex real-world problems, changing the way organizations operate and unlocking significant societal benefits.

• The digital twin is a central element of the metaverse. These virtual models simulate real-world objects in detail. The next generation of digital twins will be photorealistic, physics-based, AI-enabled, and linked in metaverse ecosystems.

• The industrial metaverse will transform all industries. The currently existing digital twins exemplify the power and potential of the industrial metaverse to revolutionize design and engineering, testing, operations, and training.