Annika Hauptvogel, head of technology and innovation management at Siemens, describes the industry metaverse as “immersive, making users feel like they are in a real environment. Collaborate in real time; Open enough to seamlessly interact with different applications; and trusted by the individuals and businesses involved” – more so than the digital world.
The industrial metaverse will not only change the way work is done, but also unlock significant new value for businesses and communities. By allowing businesses to design, prototype, and test dozens, hundreds, or millions of design iterations in real-time, and before committing physical and human resources to a project in an immersive physics-based environment, Industrial Metaverse tools usher in a new era of digitally solving real-world problems.
“The real world is very messy, noisy and sometimes really hard to understand,” said Danny Lange, senior vice president of artificial intelligence at Unity Technologies, a leading platform for creating and enhancing real-time 3-D content. “The idea of the industrial metaverse is to create a clean connection between the real world and the virtual world, because the virtual world is much easier and cheaper to work with.”
While real-life applications of the consumer metaverse are still developing, industrial metaverse use cases are purpose-driven, aligned with real-world problems and business imperatives. Resource efficiencies enabled by Industrial Metaverse solutions can increase business competitiveness and drive sustainable development toward sustainability, resilience, decarbonization, and dematerialization goals essential to human progress.
This report explores what it takes to differentiate the industry, the potential impact on business and society, the challenges ahead and the new use cases that will shape the future. His main findings are as follows.
• The Industry Metaverse brings the digital and real worlds together. It enables the seamless exchange of information, data and decisions and enables industries to solve extraordinarily complex real-world problems digitally, transforming how organizations operate and unlocking significant societal benefits.
• The digital twin is the main building block of the metaverse. These virtual models simulate real-world objects in detail. The next generation of digital twins will be photography-based, physics-based, AI-enabled and connected in the Metaverse ecosystem.
• The Industry Metaverse will transform every industry. Today’s digital twins demonstrate the power and potential of the industrial metaverse to transform design and engineering, testing, operations and training.
