Industrial Metaverse

About a month ago Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse to the technology sector, and it is since then that the topic is already giving a lot to talk about around the world.

But what is the Metaverse?

The metaverse is a virtual world that extends the real world to the digital one. It is like a copy of the reality, in which you create an avatar, like in a video game, in which once you enter the platform you can interact with other real avatars and have a conversation, as well as go to concerts, attend conferences Ted Talks, buying paintings in museums or going shopping, for example.

In all of this, there are several key points that will make this work:

• On the one hand, virtual reality. This world must be totally immersive and allow you to interact with it as you would in real life. Using various physical devices such as virtual reality glasses, helmets or gloves with different sensors, we will allow our avatar to express in the metaverse, the body language that we are doing in the physical world.

• On the other hand, interconnectivity. We could define interconnectivity as the ability to connect or establish connections between various devices or people. In this way, multiple people can have access to the same place, in order to establish connections.

As for the industrial metaverse, therefore, the metaverse applied in the industry, the automobile companies Audi, Mercedes-Benz or Toyota, among others, already use the virtual reality glasses HoloLens 2 to optimize the processes in the manufacture and development of your products within a mixed reality.

So far, we could say that the industrial metaverse is the union of the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (physical + virtual reality).

In fact, NVIDIA and BMW Group merged their interests for the realization of the "factory of the future", an omniverse that will be able to make an exact copy of the production plant at scale and in real time with digital twins. This will allow the tool and device testing before being built at its Regensburg, Germany plant.

Digital twins are digital representations of reality that allow real-world data to be used to simulate products or testing processes, which have not been implemented yet.

Some of the main advantages of digital twins can be:

• Personalization. To represent the simulation of how a plant would respond to customer specifications.

• Efficiency, productivity and quality. Testing in virtual environments leads to direct cost savings, as well as greater productivity and quality in the processes.

• Innovation. The fact that it is efficient allows you to explore new business opportunities and invest in innovation.

• Prediction. In the same way that you can innovate, the fact of being a simulation of reality allows you to anticipate future incidents.

A virtual twin is an increasingly common technology in Industry 4.0 adopted in industrial and commercial processes, mainly. If used correctly, digital twins facilitate and accelerate the momentum of business innovation.

For this, you need a fixed cloud data collection system needed to generate all the processes, as well as sensors and quality tools.

Even so, large technology companies such as Facebook, are committed to the metaverse and to gradually introduce the concept with small applications, in the same way, that the Internet has gradually been introduced with all that it entails. Zuckerberg said that Facebook's intention has always been to interconnect people, so by betting with the metaverse, people would be more interconnected than ever.