Building a better train doesn’t end with delivering the railcars. When Siemens was asked to improve train reliability, the company added sensors and built digital models that could predict the need for door maintenance 10 days before a door actually got stuck—allowing mechanics to prevent delays before they happened.

Peter Koerte, chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens, says the potential of the industrial metaverse doesn’t end there. “The minute you start to connect real-world operations with a digital simulation thereof,” he says, “you can enable a lot of new services you even hadn’t thought about in the beginning.” When the covid-19 pandemic struck, and transit usage plummeted, those same sensors were repurposed to monitor capacity and ridership.

The industrial metaverse will provide an interface between the real world and a digital world, built on simulations and digital models of complex human systems like machines, factories, or cities. Koerte names five building blocks that will help the industrial metaverse achieve its full potential: these detail-perfect models, termed “digital twins”; simulations based on realistic physics; tools for seamless virtual collaboration; the ability to build immersive and photorealistic environments; and computing power that allows real-time responsiveness. All these capabilities are developing, and their continual improvement will fuel industrial metaverse innovation.

The industrial metaverse will be a powerful accelerator for digital transformation. The power of simulation will allow designers and manufacturers to get things right in the digital world before committing physical resources. 

And while interoperability and platform challenges will have to be overcome to bring the industrial metaverse to fruition, Koerte is enthusiastic about its revolutionary potential. The metaverse will speed progress toward sustainability goals, he says, by conserving physical resources, building carbon considerations into design processes, enabling more accurate accounting of emissions, and advancing digitalization. He explains, “there’s a lot of very real-world applications that can help us make this much, much better.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Siemens.

Related Reading

The emergent industrial metaverse, report, MIT Technology Review Insights, March 29, 2023