Industrial IoT devices have an important role in the Industrial Metaverse that will help us build a better future.

The prime time for Industrial IoT is coming in full force. In the age of the Industrial Metaverse, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices will be the building blocks of the Metaverse, where all connected edge devices and sensors that provide the sensing data are fed back to the giant metaverse. From a geometric perspective of the Point-Line-Plane, imagine an IoT device is a point in space. The digital twin comprises a variety of IoT devices that are a current representation of the physical object. The digital thread represents a timeline of the virtual object. What if we can be immersed in a virtual space and see how these virtual objects interact with one another and learn how things work before applying them to the real world? This could be a life change experience. An immersive experience like such will allow us to make decisions in real-time and with greater confidence, and this experience is called the Industrial Metaverse.

To learn more about Digital Twin and Digital Thread, you can read my previous article: Unlocking the Benefits of IIoT and Digital Twin Technologies in Manufacturing Organizations (https://www.unitingdigital.com/articles/2022/8/16/unlocking-the-benefits-of-iiot-and-digital-twin-technologies-in-manufacturing-organizations)

The Drives and Needs for Industrial Metaverse

At the moment, all the big players are trying to define what the metaverse means and what it takes to achieve such a grand plan, especially in the industrial arena. The market and technologies are driving us to the unforeseen future and may detour from the familiar ideology to the next iteration - Industry 5.0. Due to the unexpected effects of the pandemic, global supply chains, and the dependency on suppliers worldwide, a country like Finland feels seriously affected by all this development. Finnish industry proposes several initiatives to move forward with Industry 6.0 from Industry 4.0, with antifragility as a design principle since they realize that robustness is insufficient and plan to skip the Industrial 5.0 transition. Many businesses under pressure from simultaneous global shocks, such as the pandemic, policy, or trade war, are at the crossroads to the path of the Industrial Revolution Industry 6.0. But which road to take is mind-boggling.

As we know from the industrial revolution history, when technology is evolving rapidly, business leaders need to transform to adopt new opportunities with a clear vision for the future. New technologies in transition and digitalization can drive the need to change businesses’ operations. Building the Metaverse could be a catalyst for accelerating the industries' change, efficiency, and resiliency since the next industrial disruption technology is the Industrial Metaverse. The concept of the virtual world that is always on consists of virtualization with AR/VR, 5G real-time network, artificial intelligence, edge technologies, digital twins, blockchain, and Web 3.0 as its underlying infrastructure. Regardless of how the big players define what it is, the common theme around Metaverse is the combination of the real and the digital worlds. The common benefit of the Metaverse is to make the real world much better because it will work much better when we have tools to predict and resolve foreseen problems before its real-world implementation.

Potential Use Cases - A Survey of Industry Metaverse

Here are some concrete examples of how current technologies help define the Industrial Metaverse in the process of Design-Build-Operate-Optimize.

1. Virtual Product Development and Engineering

To reduce product development costs and the time to market, BMW partnered with Holo-Light, an extended reality (XR) streaming company, to stream and worked on 3D graphics. Using their Augmented Reality Engineering Space AR3S, they empower their engineers to visualize their own 3D CAD models and work collaboratively on them in an AR space. Best of all, physical prototypes can be easily broken if handled too many times. Their virtual counterparts can be used repeatedly without degradation. BMW empowers its customers to have 2100 options to customize their own cars. BMW manufacturer claims to roll out a fully customized car every minute using the digital twin approach in the BMW iFactory.

2. On-the-job training

On-the-job training has evolved into in-person and virtual coaching from experts in places such as training centers, factories, warehouses, or even logistics terminals. Since people are excited to use Virtual reality (VR) technology, and in a way, it helps to bring people together without the extra cost of traveling to a central location or creating the training materials. Nokia has already employed this VR Hands-on training since 2021, and they felt that VR makes learning a much more practical experience. For example, VR and AR training can make the invisible visible for training purposes by going through the whole process from unpacking the equipment to attaching the power cable, mounting it in the rack, switching it on, and installing the software. The trainees can better understand the entire process and get their certification in no time.

3. A Digital Native Factory

Before the first concrete was poured, they built a virtual factory - a digital native plant. Siemens has already made such a plant in Nanjing, China. They claim that the manufacturing capacity increased by 200% and productivity by 20%. The entire plant’s performance was simulated with a digital twin. With the right design, they can pinpoint significant planning errors before they can happen. For example, they can identify the issue of the ventilation system in the painting machine during a virtual inspection. In the real world, fixing the problem could cost money and time.

4. Virtual City Development

Planning on city development can be daunting, especially in Berlin, where you want to modernize the old city. With Siemens’ technological solutions, the city’s urban planning office leverages digital twin ideas to create a holistic digital and integral ‘city-twin’ to simulate and significantly optimize city planning and operations in advance for the Siemensstadt Square project. This digital twin uses real-time data on power usage and transport, along with the shapes of the buildings and the street layout. By 2035, a modern and urban living and working environment will be created with an open urban district of the future that combines work, research, and life on an area of over 173 acres.

5. Energy Business

For a company that generates energy with offshore wind by wind turbines, it is crucial to find the optimal location, perform pre-planning for the delivery, and design the cabling under the sea to transfer the energy back to the energy storage plant. With Industrial Metaverse, an international energy company like Equinor can make better decisions in the site selection phase. They can choose and test concepts based on simulations with real data. Their goal is to optimize the wind farm before it’s built. With Microsoft’s Industrial Metaverse technology, they are able to build, operate and maintain in a sustainable and cost-efficient manner. It’s a sustainable solution for Equinor.

Looking forward to BUILDING the Industrial Metaverse

The main idea behind the industrial Metaverse is to help solve real-world problems in a virtual world. Siemens and NVIDIA recently announced that they have collaborated to enable the Industrial Metaverse and increase the use of AI-driven digital twin technology. They want to create a real-time, immersive Industrial Metaverse that connects hardware and software from the edge to the cloud and leverages the power of AI-enabled, photorealistic, physics-based digital twins. In this collaboration, the companies plan to connect Siemens Xcelerator, the open digital business platform, and NVIDIA Omniverse™, a 3D design and collaboration platform, as a first step. Later, a fusion of physics-based digital models from Siemens and real-time AI from NVIDIA hopes to enable an Industrial Metaverse with physics-based digital models.

In another collaboration of Microsoft and Mercedes-Benz, they created the MO360 Data Platform connecting passenger car plants in the Microsoft Cloud to help drive vehicle production efficiency, which is expected to improve by 20% by 2025. This unique and unified data platform is standardized on Microsoft Azure, providing Mercedes-Benz with flexibility and cloud computing power to run artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics at a global scale across regions while addressing cybersecurity and compliance standards. This partnership becomes a great example of merging the physical and digital worlds to accelerate value creation when implementing the Industrial Metaverse.

Digital transformation is not just about technological advancements but also requires businesses to collaborate closely with other companies in various industrial sectors. The Industrial Metaverse will drive businesses closer and will forever change the way we collaborate within organizations, ecosystems, and between companies and their clients and customers.

Conclusion

Metaverse Industry Report published by Strategic Market Research confirms that the global market value is $47.48 billion in 2022, having a robust CAGR of 39.44%, and it is expected to surpass the value of $678.80 billion by 2030.

Unlike the Metaverse concept in the gaming industry, the Industrial Metaverse has a physical implication on the real world as it understands the physical world by obeying the laws of physics and gives recommendations that will affect the real world. It’s beyond general simulation modeling since it is a real-time operation or a process that continues to operate in the virtual world. In Metaverse, a digital twin is a live digital twin. There is no doubt that the industrial IoT is the building block of the Industrial Metaverse, where it is integrated with IoT in terms of its hardware, software, and services.

In an ecosystem of Metaverse, it begins with the collection of real-time IoT data. As the information is aggregated, it forms the necessary components to create a digital twin. When problems occur, the live digital twin in the Metaverse empowers engineering, manufacturing, and logistics teams to jump into the immersive world to repose the problem and develop a solution. Later, they can be further tested and validated using digital twins across thousands of scenario simulations. It would let the product continue to live in the virtual space to help make continuous improvements on the products. The possibilities of what Industrial Metaverse can help the industrial sector are tremendous and limitless.

Metaverse will help drive a new level of speed and agility for manufacturing in the era of software and AI-driven digital transformation while eliminating the need for physical prototypes, reducing critical downtime, and increasing manufacturing productivity. It will indeed change how businesses operate and how people live forever.

About the Author

Arthur Wang