1. What is the industrial metaverse?
If we consider the metaverse as a world that combines virtuality, reality, and humanity and its thoughts, then the industrial metaverse is a part of the metaverse. If we consider the metaverse as a concept or a technology, then the industrial metaverse can be understood as the application of metaverse concepts and technologies in industry; it is the metaverse that empowers industry, promoting industrial improvement, innovation, and even revolution.
In the economic and social sphere, industry is the material production sector that involves the extraction of natural resources and the processing and assembly of various raw materials. Currently, it remains the primary component of the industrial structure in terms of economic scale. Therefore, exploring the metaverse of industry is clearly of great significance and has value for application to other sectors of society.
The Industrial Metaverse is a comprehensive integration of emerging technologies such as 3D design, virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, digital twins, the Internet of Things, 5G networks, big data, and cloud computing. As infrastructure, it will significantly enhance computing power (hardware, software, and algorithms), display capabilities, interaction levels, communication traffic, speed, and data storage. This will revolutionize the ecosystem of industrial enterprises and industries, change people's thinking patterns, promote creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and enhance the richness, quality, refinement, and artistry of industrial products, making them more competitive and ultimately creating enormous economic and social value.
Simplifying the metaverse can be narrowly understood as enhancing the unit technology, integration, and overall level of information technology. The core emphasis is on upgrading visualization capabilities, aiming to improve the user experience, stimulate rapid thinking, and trigger appropriate and effective actions to achieve outstanding results. Industry plays a vital role in the national economy; therefore, combining national policies with the metaverse, integrating informatization and industrialization, intelligent manufacturing, and digital transformation, and improving the technological level and capabilities of these projects will have a significant impact on industry, thereby elevating industrial products, industrial enterprise production processes, and industrial product applications to a level of excellence.
2. What can the industrial metaverse do?
While the concept of the metaverse has been around for decades, and advancements in materials science, IT, and artificial intelligence have led to the development of some related products, they are largely impractical. For example, many people believe that wearing VR headsets for more than 15 minutes will cause dizziness.
For example, network infrastructure, due to current transmission capacity limitations, cannot currently achieve millisecond-level transmission for hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of data in the metaverse model's three-dimensional information. Therefore, the interactive experience is poor, failing to meet the requirements of immersion and realism. Thus, experts believe that the metaverse should be analyzed and considered from the perspectives of feasibility, necessity, and urgency. The final conclusion is that exploration of the industrial metaverse should begin now. This means neither being obsessed with the metaverse nor observing from the sidelines or even keeping a respectful distance, but rather making appropriate investments and tentatively advancing it in specific sub-fields and typical scenarios.
Based on the above considerations, the Industrial Metaverse was born. From the perspective of the development path of industrial informatization, it can be divided into five levels: unit application, system application, integrated application, networked application, and integration with the broader Internet. The development and application path of the Industrial Metaverse is similar.
Typical technologies and products that have gradually developed include 2D drawing tools, 3D design software, product lifecycle management systems, enterprise resource planning systems and manufacturing operation systems, and computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation. For example, in the technology and management field, industrial products in the industrial metaverse not only need to meet general functional and performance requirements, but also need to conform to human psychology. This requires industrial design work, comprehensively considering the product's appearance, materials, and texture to provide a better user experience. Of course, the product also needs to meet people's convenience requirements. All of these place higher demands on modeling software and systems. On the other hand, modeling software systems suitable for non-professionals, even children and the elderly, have also emerged, thus laying the foundation for mass innovation.
Furthermore, there are production and equipment-related categories, most typically CNC machine tools, testing equipment, robots, intelligent transport vehicles, and other automated and intelligent equipment. Digital twin technology, as a typical technology in the industrial metaverse, can be considered as the simultaneous change of physical and digital virtual things in the application of processing equipment and industrial product production. Through precise mapping, digital models can be remotely created and information can be displayed in VR/AR format, enabling people to better understand, monitor, and process things, thereby achieving interaction and collaboration among multiple subjects, ultimately achieving real-time, accurate, and correct production, thus ensuring product quality and meeting customers' perfection requirements.
3. What preparations still need to be made for the industrial metaverse?
In the metaverse era, the number of entities and contents connected to the system will increase dramatically. Typically, an individual will have multiple identities; more devices will be connected through the Internet of Things; an individual will own more and more smart devices; and our environment and the world we live in will have more intelligent terminals, including those with data collection, transmission, computing, and control capabilities. Therefore, the future will not be the previously mentioned Internet of Everything, but rather the Internet of Trillions and Equinoxes. The prerequisite for this interconnection is the transformation of things from the physical world to things in the digital and virtual worlds. For the industrial metaverse, the first thing needed is a massive network with low latency and high bandwidth.
However, the network support requirements vary greatly depending on the type of application scenario. For example, industrial production often requires millisecond-level processing, and for traditional two-dimensional information, human perception can tolerate a latency of less than 300 milliseconds. However, for the transmission of tens or hundreds of megabytes of three-dimensional data, a latency of tens of milliseconds is required to avoid causing dizziness. This places very high demands on the network, making comprehensive solutions tailored to specific scenarios particularly important.
For the industrial metaverse, in addition to network upgrades, a powerful processing terminal—the cloud platform—is also needed. For the industrial sector, cloudification is an inevitable trend, and the aggregation of resources requires better standards, interfaces, and protocols for better integration and unification. Therefore, the cloud platform will become the foundation and venue for the convergence of the physical world, the digital world, the virtual world, and people; it is a core of the metaverse that we must look up to, explore, and from which enormous benefits can be gained.
