How enterprises can unlock the full potential of the industrial metaverse.

Even as technologists are trying to envision what the metaverse will bring for businesses and consumers, the industrial metaverse is already transforming how people design, manufacture, and interact with physical entities across industries.

While definitions abound and it remains to be seen how the industrial metaverse will fully unfold, digital twins are increasingly viewed as one of its key applications. Used for everything from creating ecosystems when planning a new city to working out iterations of manufacturing processes, digital twins were first proposed in 2002 and later became a vital technology when the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) accelerated automation and digitization across industries.

Simply put, a digital twin is a virtual replica of a product or process used to predict how the physical entity will perform throughout its lifecycle. BMW, for instance, created a virtual twin of its production plant in Bavaria before building the physical facility. Boeing is using a digital twin development model to design its airplanes. And “Virtual Singapore” is a digital representation of the Southeast Asian nation that the government created to support its policy decisions and test new technologies. The increasing buzz surrounding digital twins is fueling expectations for the industrial metaverse.

Metaverse essentials

For mission-critical industrial applications, the metaverse will require low-latency, massive machine communications and high reliability, in addition to fast network speeds. Edge computing is another must-have because of the requirement for almost zero latency—decentralized local edge data centers close to users will be needed for people to interact with one another and use devices to access the metaverse.

Getting to the metaverse will take more than sophisticated devices though—it will need to be a collaborative effort. “Nobody will actually own or dominate the metaverse,” says Sahgal. “It'll be all kinds of applications, devices, and other things coming together.” To facilitate that, exposing the network as code will be an important foundation. “The network’s capabilities are represented as a piece of code to the application development community, which they can embed into their applications and then consume those capabilities,” he explains. “And hence, the network becomes very programmable by the ecosystem.” In addition, software-as-a-service will help more organizations access the industrial metaverse and in turn, facilitate agility and rapid innovation.

Meanwhile, Klein compares building the metaverse to having the right selection of blocks and interfaces to connect them in various ways. “Imagine that you bought a Lego set to build a model plane,” he explains. “Initially, you’re quite happy with building that plane, but after a while you are bored and you want to build something else, say a boat, or a car, or a house. How do you build something different that matches your creative interest? It’s the same foundational building blocks from the original Lego set that you reuse, but you put them together in different ways.”

For the industrial metaverse, those building blocks are the enabling modules, applications, and software assets. “You will connect them together in different ways,” says Klein, “using application programming interfaces to create new solutions that solve your specific industrial challenges and match the business logic of your use cases.” An ecosystem of partners, technology and network providers, data producers and owners, and application developers will contribute to these building blocks. Collectively, they facilitate a digital marketplace and lead to new and unprecedented levels of innovation, creativity, and agile and collaborative service creation.

As with any innovative technology, security is paramount, especially because cyberattacks have surged in recent years, with criminals employing increasingly sophisticated technology such as AI, ransomware-as-a-service, and deepfakes. Sahgal says cybersecurity will become even more important in the industrial metaverse: “That's where you're dealing with very mission-critical data; if that gets compromised, it could have a huge impact on that specific industry as well.”

Keeping people’s identities secure and protecting the data shared within virtual collaboration will also be integral, especially across a decentralized ecosystem of stakeholders who may not have pre-established business and relationships with one another.

Real potential

While increased demand for performance, ultra-reliability, and advanced cybersecurity need to be addressed before the metaverse can be fully utilized on a global scale, experts say companies should not wait to capitalize on this new wave of technology. “It starts with awareness,” says Sahgal. “Acknowledging that this is not an experiment anymore.” But awareness should also be accompanied by the right technology—intelligent, autonomous, cloud-native networks with high bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Industries will also have to modernize their infrastructure to make it much more open and accessible to participate in the industrial metaverse.

Both Sahgal and Klein say they believe early users of the industrial metaverse will be concentrated in certain industries, particularly those involving physical assets, such as manufacturing, logistics, and transportation. The health-care industry could also benefit from metaverse applications, specifically in avenues such as telemedicine and robotic surgery. “The use cases are infinite, quite frankly, because you can apply it almost to any industry,” says Sahgal. While much about the metaverse remains unknown, its endless possibilities seem to be the only certainty.