Industrial metaverse - from industrial IoT to holistic digital twins of operations (2023 Prediction #10)

The metaverse currently stands for the vision of a digital universe with many different virtual worlds where people can “live” an immersive, real-time experience. To bring this visionary topic down to earth, we have chosen a more basic definition: a holistic virtual environment that allows humans to interact in real time with simulated things, people, and processes. Metaverse-related use cases for commercial users typically focus on three aspects – office productivity (collaboration), sales and marketing (virtual shopping malls and fairs), and HR (training sessions that require realistic environments or engaging, fun elements).

The industrial metaverse is strongly centered around the interaction of people with and around digital models of complex industrial operations. This covers holistic simulations of physical things such as large production lines and entire factories, but also processes like supply chains.

While a range of different technologies are required to enable this, digital twins (virtual representations of physical things, places, and processes) form the centerpiece of the industrial metaverse. AI-based simulations allow for real-time experiences and interactions with industrial operations. Graph databases help to store the relationships between different digital twins. IoT helps to synchronize the physical with the digital world. This allows to monitor and analyze the current situation, track the past, predict the future, and ultimately create autonomous systems. AR/VR technology enables humans to interact with the industrial metaverse in an immersive way. PAC observes that organizations are already using elements of digital twins in different areas, and we expect to see more and more integration efforts towards building more holistic digital twins of operations – or, in other words, to reflect an organization’s operations in an industrial metaverse.

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This blog is part of a series of PAC’s 2023 Top 10 predictions. Click here to see our 10 predictions