Social vs. Industrial Metaverse
Almost a year ago I’ve written about NVIDIA Omniverse having the building blocks for the Industrial Metaverse (see here).
Today we see more and more use-cases and early adopters who contribute to this vision of a global scale network helping to create perfect products without waste, most recently Siemens committed with NVIDIA as well to this vision:
Another and in public reception even more prominent step into the Metaverse is done by Mark Zuckerbergs Meta company with significant investments:
All these efforts contribute to the vision of a next generation mixed reality internet - but how is the enterprise facing aspect of the Metaverse different from the consumer facing side and how are they related ?
Definitions of the Metaverse
Matthew Ball coins in his book “The Metaverse” a definition of what I’d call the Social Metaverse:
“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.“
for the Industrial Metaverse I’d use the following definition:
“A global scale network of enterprises using interoperable digital twins of products and processes across the product life cycle and throughout value chains to design, simulate and produce perfect products without waste.“
To illustrate how both aspects of the Metaverse relate and what concepts like interoperable assets and continuity of data mean - lets look at a simple example — a skateboard.
The skateboard example
Lets suppose you are a Metaverse user and have decided to visit one of the many connected virtual worlds as Matthew Ball has described, let’s call it “Horizon World”.
Create
While strolling around you drop in an asset store of your favorite skateboard manufacturer “Skateboards Inc.” and find a skateboard configurator booth which enables you to create the skateboard you’ve always dreamed of.
After you’ve configured the model to your liking you press a button on the configurator and the virtual asset gets created and transferred to your inventory.
Simulate
As a proud owner of your virtual skateboard you decide to travel to another virtual world, lets call it “The Green Zone”, which hosts all kinds of virtual outdoor activities.
You give it a shot at the virtual half-pipe and perform some wild stunts to show off your brand new virtual skateboard there.
This illustrates the continuity of data and interoperability of assets — you can use the skateboard asset, created in the world before, in the simulation of the halfpipe in the current world — therefore the virtual asset has to have standardized geometric and physical properties as well as to provide semantic information to enable the world to integrate it in its simulation.
Customize
You’d then travel to another world, lets call it “Artistverse”, a world where artists hang out — you could ask you favorite graffiti artist to create a custom artwork for the deck.
The artist of your preference may use Adobe Substance 3D Painter to exchange the texture on the plank of your skateboard while another artist may use Blender to do it.
In order to make that possible the the different properties of the asset have to be standardized to enable different software tools to modify them. Those modifications have to be persistent across virtual worlds as well.
Produce
Now lets suppose you travel back to the real world and exchange your virtual reality headset with augmented reality glasses — you’ve had so much fun with your virtual skateboard, so you decide to get a real one as well — it should look just like the virtual one.
So with a finger tap on your AR glasses you open your virtual asset inventory, select the skateboard and order the real product from “Skateboards Inc.”.
A few days later you’ll receive the real product with your custom artwork printed on the plank.
The real product has a digital product key printed on it which would links it to its virtual counterpart.
So anybody wearing AR glasses can scan the digital product key and get one for themselves, either the virtual asset or the real one from “Skateboards Inc.” — the possibilities are endless.
Digital Twins
Now we’ve reached the point where we leave the Social Metaverse and step into the Industrial Metaverse — we’ve created a real product, which is linked to a digital asset.
From the perspective of the real world product the digital asset is the digital twin. The Industrial Metaverse is built on digital twins.
Digital Factory
If you remember the scene from the video from nvidia and Siemens, we can see that the production environment shown there is a digital twin of the real manufacturing environment and consists of lots of interconnected digitial twins of real world assets like robots, fixtures and even human workers.
But let’s stick to our skateboard example — let’s suppose you are running “Skateboards Inc.” .
Digital Twins along the product life cycle
Your designers have designed the product and its variants, your sales team has used that early design to create the product configurator which is placed in your virtual asset store in “Horizon World”.
Your engineering team has created the skateboard construction in their CAD system.
Your production planners work out a manufacturing process which has to take into account all possible product variants, as well as the provide the customization option with a custom deck paint job.
Your manufacturing team has defined a production schedule for the shopfloor to make sure that all product orders are fullfilled in time using all resources efficiently and without waste.
In our perfect Industrial Metaverse vision every department uses and enriches the digital product twin to communicate, collaborate and optimize.
Note that there is the product with its digital twin and lots of product instances, each with its own digital twin — in our example the digital product twin describes the skateboard with all product variants in general, whereas the product instance and its digital twin relate to a concrete skateboard produced for a customer.
Digital Twins across value chains
The Industrial Metaverse shines when it comes to value chains — interoperable digital product twins can not only be leveraged along their product life cycle but also across value chains spanning many organizations — the skateboards of “Skateboards Inc.” are assembled from parts like wheels, trucks or screws, which are sourced from different suppliers.
Each sourced part itself is the product of the respective supplier and has its own product life cycle. The same applies for the equipment used in the factory like CNC machines or other tools.
Using digitial twins of all production materials and the factory equipment for planning and operation can unlock potential in all workflows and operational activities, which leads to more sustainable processes across entire value chains and even creates new opportunities like tracking the carbon footprint of a product over the entire lifecycle.
Observed & Planned Reality, Projects & Scenarios
The fundamental difference between the Social Metaverse and the Industrial Metaverse can be seen in the fact that the Industrial Metaverse adds an additional layer of reality, which is not real-time but rather uses time as an additional dimension to describe historic and future states of all digital twins it contains, I’d call this the “Planned Reality” layer which may be updated from the real-time layer which I’d call “Observed Reality”.
Historic states can for example be obtained by logging sensor data of the devices in the shop floor, future states can be derrived from simulations of planned future activities and projects.
In an enterprise there are always lots of different projects going on, with different planning horizons and different scopes. A new product may be launched, another may be cancelled, the production environment may be changed or reorganized or the sales forecast may change.
In general the business environment keeps getting more volatile (VUCA) and each project team has to have the full picture of a holistic digital twin at any time to support and verify its decisions process during planning and execution phase.
Therefore project management systems will also have to play a vital role in the Industrial Metaverse.
Conclusion
We’ve seen that common elements of Social- and Industrial Metaverse are data continuity and interoperable digital assets.
However we’ve also seen that there are differences — in the Social Metaverse we’ve got individual users enjoying a synchronous real-time experience by interacting with digital assets and with each other, in the Industrial Metaverse we’ve got organizations striving for sustainable products and processes by leveraging holistic digital twins across the product life cycle and throughout value chains.
It remains to be seen which side of the Metaverse vision will be realized sooner, as a Digital Factory enthusiast I’ve got a preference :-)
