Industrial metaverse takes prominence alongside consumer technology at MWC 2023

As might be expected, "metaverse" was a much-used word at Mobile World Congress 2023, held from Feb. 27 to March 2 in Barcelona, Spain. Telcos were looking at potential use cases in the business-to-consumer space and in business-to-business enterprise applications. Siemens AG, NVIDIA Corp. and Neom's subsidiary Tonomus, an emerging technology consulting company, all shared practical observations at the event. Some of the most impactful metaverse content came from the industrial sector. For vendors at MWC, private 5G installations are a typical approach in places such as manufacturing plants for industrial internet of things (IIoT).

The operational technology (OT) world leans toward what can be practically delivered today, and that makes a significant difference to processes. It also needs robust engineering approaches that can be trusted. It is harder and more expensive to simulate an entire factory and products with 100% fidelity than it is to build a virtual room for an avatar-based brainstorming meeting, but industrial metaverse-style applications can result in bigger financial and environmental, social and governance impacts delivered at scale.

The need for data interoperability across many OT suppliers and services to create unified simulation models and digital twins is a driver for general metaverse interoperability and standards. B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprise metaverse applications are currently more about trying to claim ownership of the user and their data in a drive to own a marketplace. The trajectory of the industrial metaverse — its presence at a previously consumer-based telecommunication show, for example — provides an indicator of its long-term influence over digital interactions in the future.

Context

The 451 Research OT Perspective 2023 survey data suggests the maturing of IIoT, with nearly half of industrial enterprises well into their IIoT evolution, and another quarter citing advanced adoption. Due to this evolution, MWC is now a show that attracts a large presence of traditional OT companies and systems integrators that are engaged in digital-first approaches in the next stage of this evolution of the industrial metaverse.

MWC 2023 featured a specific industry city hall where the industrial metaverse was represented and described. Conference sponsors indicated the breadth of interest in this sector with NTT Docomo Inc. (with its Qonoq metaverse play) for manufacturing, JPMorgan for fintech, Accenture PLC as a knowledge partner, and Tonomus as a supporting partner.

The show also had a separate Reality+ theme for all things metaverse, sponsored by Deloitte, some of which crossed into the industrial space. In S&P Global's full report and primer, we describe the scope of the industrial, enterprise and social spheres of the metaverse. A key consideration is that while there are many use cases in the B2B and B2C areas, industrial metaverse cases require solid engineering principles, including accurate simulation and precise representations of states. These user cases also have a clear return on investment and impact on ESG targets.

Industrial system simulation

The current art-of-the-possible in industrial metaverse applications was a focus at the event. Rather than discussing 10-year visions, the Digital Reality in the Industrial Metaverse session moderated by GSMA talked about what the participants — Nvidia, Singtel ADR, Siemens, Tonomus and KPN ADR — are doing to enable a richer digital engineering ecosystem, with demonstrable savings and benefits for the OT industries.

Nvidia presented its view of the industrial metaverse via its Omniverse platform and the range of partnerships in its ecosystem. It aims to create as accurate a representation of the physical world as possible with digital twins. It sees the metaverse as simply describing a more spatial shared 3D representation for people and robots to engage with. Nvidia said Omniverse lets enterprises bring all their data together into a single truth with the goal of being a 100% photorealistic and operational simulation of the physical world. Nvidia references its games industry roots in now bringing high-end visual rendering to factories and plant machinery.

It also highlighted the workflow of design-build-operate as being a unified process. Nvidia said digital twins give manufacturers "superpowers." The concept has been used across several other metaverse presentations to help explain what emerging digital approaches are bringing us. The company used teleportation as an example of being able to be present, but remote; to travel to the past to investigate previous states in data; to travel to the future to run what-if simulations; and to explore many alternate futures running many different digital twin simulations.

Nvidia cited customers such as Volvo ADR testing Omniverse in its research and development workflows to move to real-time digital design collaboration. Predator Cycling uses the collaborative nature of the platform to engage with customers by providing digital representations of potential products to gather comments and feedback. Nvidia also envisions the BMW Group's factory of the future, where a completely new car factory has been built and simulated that includes the cars and parts produced in the factory, down to the last bolt. The design flow incorporates how people operate in the factory, with evaluation and training occurring in the simulation.

Amazon Robotics LLC is building digital twins of its warehouse facilities to digitally train autonomous robots that will be deployed to physical warehouses. Finally, PepsiCo Inc. with partner Kinetic Vision is creating artificial intelligence-powered digital twins, using video analytics of distribution centers to help improve throughput, reduce energy usage and improve uptime.

Singtel, in its more telco-focused presentation, described how the evolution of Industry 4.0 creates many communication challenges, with different use cases requiring a variety of trade-offs with latency and bandwidth. Singtel described the business drivers for manufacturing and its mapping of the flexibility and resilience challenges across all enterprises, such as the ability to react to supply chain issues quickly.

The company went on to describe its Paragon platform to enable the adoption of 5G and edge use cases in industry, and concluded with a description of a journey toward the metaverse from gaming, enterprise and media/entertainment perspectives, with the current state of play in industrial enterprise as one of digital twins and simulations. The future state envisioned for enterprises is of a unified approach to data aggregation used in shared virtual world environments.

Tonomus is a spinoff technical division of the Saudi Neom project — a planned set of environments and smart city developments forming a new region in Saudi Arabia covering 10,200 square miles, around the size of Belgium or Albania. Tonomus is using high-end digital modeling and simulation to build everything from infrastructure and buildings to projecting how health system, business and social organizations can work.

It showed the collaborative design of property in a shared virtual environment, but also its vision of created digital assets being interoperable with any metaverse or virtual world environment. A starting point for this is the open-source Universal Scene Description (USD) approach, as in the Nvidia Omniverse ecosystem. Tonomus is also exploring AI applications to aid in the design and understanding of such a vast greenfield project.

KPN discussed its telco-focused positions on the industrial metaverse, 5G and even 6G. Its key message was that regardless of labeling — 5G, 6G, digital twins, industrial metaverse, etc. — the digital technology is already in place to start making significant improvements to areas such as manufacturing.

Siemens said it is now Europe's second-largest software company, and how it has fully engaged with helping its traditional OT clients in their digital transformation, including toward the industrial metaverse. The practical efficiency of building and validating something digitally before using any physical resources and energy was made clear. Siemens also pointed out that there are practical steps that can be taken, and that the savings and efficiencies gained by a more integrated digital engineering approach are very real.

A simple example of this was train maintenance. Diagnosing what needs to be repaired on a train before it arrives at a depot means parts and work orders are ready to go. Knowing where the part that needs servicing will be on the platform when the train pulls in allows the tools, parts and workforce to be at the right location and be immediately effective in a short maintenance window. Many small efficiency gains through awareness of physical states via digital twins and simulation soon add up.

Siemens expanded on how entire processes that are first digitally modeled can be built efficiently while allowing for effective changes to be made during simulations — e.g., a supply chain disruption leads to changing a raw material, which requires evaluating the best course of action in the plant's operation. We have previously covered Siemens Xcelerator digital business platform in creating partnerships to building these emerging digital approaches with companies such as Nvidia and BMW ADR.