The metaverse concept has cycled through significant hype and slowed enthusiasm yet still steadily progresses. The term has seen various interpretations, first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” and more recently highlighted with Meta’s Horizon Worlds after Mark Zuckerberg’s 2021 Connect announcement.
At Schneider Electric™ and AVEVA, we focus on the physical version of the Industrial Metaverse, a collaboration that integrates advanced digital technologies with physical infrastructure. We view it through the lens of:
- How edge computing would enable it
- What the Enterprise Metaverse entails
- What the industrial version is and means
- Which use cases it can supercharge
Understanding what it can provide is just one piece of the enablement puzzle. What about its actual business value?
How do we assess the value brought by the Industrial Metaverse?
When considering new technology, a major constraint seen in the industrial world is the return on investment (ROI) of its deployment. On manufacturing shop floors, capital investment decisions are more easily justified with an ROI of 2 years, sometimes even less.
Today, investing in the Industrial Metaverse may not meet that requirement. However, that does not mean the concept should be relegated to science fiction altogether. Short-term objectives should not justify short-sighted actions.
As Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that created them.” Conversely, what if this new concept could unlock some of the challenges the industrial world faces today? At Schneider Electric, we think it’s worth asking the question.
A definition for the Industrial Metaverse can be useful, but unfortunately, there is no consensus. Instead, it is more valuable to focus on its five key parts:
- Digital twins and collaboration: First and foremost, virtualization, particularly digital twins, is a growing key trend. In parallel, collaboration on larger projects is a growing challenge. Take, for example, the Airbus A380 passenger plane, an enormously complex engineering endeavor, or the Pressurised Water Reactor projects whose size and complexity require decades of work to build. Both came to fruition due to collaboration. The Industrial Metaverse, combining human-centric features with advanced technologies, may provide the means to continue to support the next generation of megaprojects.
- IIoT and edge computing: Since the Industrial Metaverse is anchored in physical reality, capturing and processing real-time data is crucial. Read more about these insights in our previous blog post.
- Data hubs: Captured data must be easily accessible; hence, it must be suitably hosted to be widely shared. However, hosting must balance challenges from ownership to security, usage rights to availability, funding to freedom of access, normalization to unrestrained creativity, and trust to innovative modeling. For example, another great megaproject, Shell Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FNLG), used the AVEVA PI platform to track data both in the process control system and the business domain.
Artificial intelligence (AI): The sheer application size of the Industrial Metaverse concept will require more than structured, linear, or deterministic engineering. AI can provide the exponential capacity multiplier to scale the metaverse design. - Ecosystems: The very principle of the Industrial Metaverse aims to unite people and organizations. Its creation and operation would be similarly based, echoing to enable collaboration once established. Besides the collaborative work done by the Metaverse Standards Forum, which is a great ecosystem on the subject as you’d expect it to be, or the ARC Advisory Group, open platforms contribute to the convergent Industrial Metaverse. Take UniversalAutomation.Org, which decouples industrial automation hardware from its software, paving the way for virtualized hardware and universal sharing of runtime application software.
Are you Industrial Metaverse ready?
With the above elements in mind, there are six key activities that leaders should consider to ensure mindset readiness and to realize the rewards of the Industrial Metaverse:
- Check standards: The industrial community is already active on the subject of the metaverse. Under the Industrial Metaverse working group, the abovementioned Metaverse Standards Forum can provide current and valuable insights on its readiness and applicability.
- Embrace ecosystems: Collaborating with other organizations can amplify its contribution larger than your investment by complementing it with others. Under its still-not-fully-defined shape, the Industrial Metaverse may become something different from what the community thinks of it today. Being part of that community helps ensure readiness.
- Future-proof the technology you adopt: The digital tools you adopt influence your product design, manufacturing methods, and operational data. Consider forward compatibility with emerging standards as an additional technology selection criterion.
- Assess how to enable collaboration across your organization: Identify low-hanging digitalization opportunities to enhance productivity and foster collaboration, getting you closer to some shape of the metaverse.
- Structure data for scaling and sharing: Organise the data you generate. Consider what exists, its use, and how it should be ideally structured. Doing so will save enormously on aggregated time across your workforce by avoiding repetition and pervasive and temporary fixes.
- Make your work reusable and compatible: In some ways, this is equivalent to building your metaverse “bricks” (e.g., designing demos that connect to others and inviting ecosystem partners to add theirs). It helps you start contributing and bringing the vision closer to reality.
I hope these suggestions resonate and will guide us towards the evolving Industrial Metaverse. Our global Industrial Digital Transformation consulting team can help you on the journey. To learn more, visit our Industrial Digital Transformation webpage.
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