The metaverse is not reserved for video games, social networks or the Web3: it also has many industrial applications and already the first use cases.
However, to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the metaverse, companies must rise to the challenge of industrialization and move beyond the proof of concept (POC) stage.
The industrial world has long been accustomed to working with 3D models, especially in the field of luxury craftsmanship, which increasingly models its products virtually before they are made. These technologies now find applications throughout the life cycle of a product, from the design phase, with PLM solutions, to maintenance and after-sales. With the industrial metaverse, the integration of technologies and 3D data is now further pushed …
From the digital twin to the metaverse …
Digital twins – digital duplicates of a product, a production line, an operator, a factory, or all four at the same time – are the first building blocks of the industrial metaverse. These tools are connected to the real world and are particularly useful for accelerating product design, simulating different configurations, anticipating changes in production lines, shortening production cycles or gaining flexibility in the supply chain.
The visualization of the digital twin using Augmented Reality and / or Virtual Reality technologies is now reaching a level of precision and realism that makes simulations and projections of virtual production lines tangible. Thus an uninformed spectator can no longer distinguish between a 3D sequence and a filmed sequence, this realism of the virtual universe allows to involve all the interlocutors. These faithful virtual representations also allow artificial intelligence to be trained in hypothetical simulated situations in the digital twin, which in particular helps improve autonomous robotics, improving supervision and factory safety.
So having a digital model or a digital twin isn’t enough to create a metaverse. To do this it is necessary to adopt a collaborative approach, opening it to all the stakeholders of the company – subcontractors, suppliers, partners, even customers – but also to the various internal professions, even if to do so it is necessary to break many silos.
Traceability and sharing of values
With an ecosystem vision, the industrial metaverse is presented as a means to share company data in a secure and traceable way to facilitate the design, production and maintenance of products. For many manufacturers, the development of the metaverse offers the opportunity to create a true platform of exchange and collaboration to improve operational efficiency.
By integrating the Web3 and blockchain logic, this collaborative space also provides answers to the challenges of traceability and sharing of value among stakeholders, allowing the improvement of everyone’s use of resources and digital content or even monetizing them. For example, a subcontractor or supplier can integrate the 3D models of the spare parts it produces into its customer’s repository and be rewarded for each use, thanks to the possibilities offered by NFTs. These new capabilities are a powerful accelerator for the adoption of additive manufacturing and 3D printing.
Connectivity to the production line
Connectivity to the supply chain is also fundamental, which allows real production data to be loaded into the metaverse, to use the digital twin to identify optimizations, but above all, in the case of alarms in the physical chain, to identify the different ones to be simulated. scenarios in the virtual world before implementing changes in the physical chain.
In this way, the aforementioned realistic virtual representation can be directly augmented by a visualization of the various statistics and their impact on the production chain with an expected representation of the consequences of these KPI evolutions.
Go beyond the POC and POV phase
The aerospace industry and carmakers – such as BMW, with Nvidia and its Omniverse solutions – have already made good progress in this reflection, digitizing their processes and bringing their ecosystem of partners together around the same digital platform. However, the industrialization of this type of approach still encounters many obstacles and too often the experiments remain in the POC (proof of concept) or POV (proof of value) phase.
However, within companies, the problem of industrialization of the production of digital assets will arise very quickly, which will lead to the creation of real production chains of digital products. The interest? Provide content to industrial metaverses, but also to the general public.
This scaling-up requires connecting the metaverse to the IS (information system), the heart of the business, by communicating historically compartmentalized data sources, such as CAD (computer-aided design) and PLM (product life cycle) data.
Finally, like any emerging technology, the metaverse holds many promises that have yet to be confirmed. Therefore, without adequate answers to the questions of choice of metaverse, architecture and relations with IS, identity and security and finally an appropriate legislative framework, its use in an industrial context risks being limited.
The task is complex, but it is the condition that must be met in order to achieve real digital continuity of this service.