Industrial Metaverse: Industry 4.0's Date With Metaverse

A well-orchestrated interplay of digital twins, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence-with scalable apps, communication networks, and immersive virtual reality-the emerging industrial metaverse spells savings and sustainability for industries, across manufacturing, construction, grid, infrastructure, transport, and more

- Janani G. Vikram

Honestly, the moment someone says metaverse, we think of a hi-fi gaming environment, which people enter as avatars to play games or for social networking. We also know that companies, ranging from carmakers to banks, have started using this as a platform to engage with customers and showcase their products and services.

It is a great place for brand promotion with celebrities and companies selling collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs), virtual merchandise, and other fancy stuff. Unless you take a deeper look, it looks like just another marketing channel.

How can the metaverse help industries?

• Capture valuable data and insights from your assets and processes

• Apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand and optimise products and processes

• Detect and mitigate problems early, before they cause any serious impact

• Simulate scenarios like part failure, natural disasters and supply delays to understand causes and impact—and proactively prevent them

• Schedule predictive maintenance

• Collaborate with people across the world to develop and test new ideas

Correct errors at the design stage itself

• Conduct what-if analyses using exact, working copies of products and processes, and real-time data

• Trial changes in the virtual space before implementing in real-life—compute power on the cloud enables you to try changes at jet speed, enabling multiple iterations to fine-tune the process

• Train employees in immersive virtual facilities that work exactly like the original—this is as good as hands-on training, but with less risk involved