Industrial Metaverse: the path to Industry 5.0

Industrial Metaverse is powered by the latest breakthroughs in automation, IoT and data analytics. Using a combination of 3D technologies, digital twins, simulation, AI, and virtual and augmented reality, Industrial Metaverse delivers both :

• A faithful reproduction of the real industrial environment and processes,
• a synchronous representation of them and an intuitive interface with their data,
• a set of digital tools to facilitate management of operations, to enhance the value of company's assets, and to prepare for the future.

A powerful asset for operational efficiency, Industrial Metaverse accelerates the path to Industry 5.0, a new era emphasizing interaction and collaboration between humans and machines. Its development is enabling the manufacturing industry to create more flexible, efficient, and sustainable production systems.

The pillars of Metaverse to meet the challenges of Industry 5.0

The Industrial Metaverse is based on three pillars: digital twin, simulation, and collaboration. Each business function in the company already relies on one of these pillars to carry out its daily activities. 
Industrial Metaverse brings these pillars together in the same environment, to foster more interactions, thereby enabling organisations to take full advantage of their data in their decision-making processes.
This technology has already been tested in various use cases, including the three presented below, with promising results. The immediate benefits achieved by these applications provide a promising foundation for many others.

The most intuitive uses of the metaverse

1. Reducing risks and hazards

Through its modelling, simulation, and remote collaboration capabilities, the Industrial Metaverse significantly helps in reducing risks and managing hazards.

Thus, for example, digital twins can be used to project into the future and test various scenarios before applying the most relevant ones on the real production line. From the data collected, manufacturers can identify risks and develop and choose the most effective strategies to mitigate them.

It also allows you to go back in time by using the data collected on the production line to reproduce situations, identify root causes, and minimise the risks involved. It can also prevent mishandling of certain machines by trainees or limit exposure to hazardous conditions through the use of simulation and remote expertise.

2. Improving operational efficiency & reducing its carbon footprint

By using 3D simulation and visualisation tools, manufacturers can :

• Experiment with different scenarios and organisations of production chains and workstations
• Evaluate the impact on workflow, productivity, and security beforehand
• And choose the most appropriate configurations accordingly.

The complete reproduction of operations and production chains significantly increases operational efficiency. By modelling and simulating different scenarios, manufacturers identify bottlenecks, inefficient operations and process improvements that can lead to increased productivity and profitability. Optimising energy and material consumption and simulating more sustainable alternatives enables Metaverse to offer manufacturers levers for monitoring and improving their carbon footprint.

Moreover, Industrial Metaverse and its underlying technologies lead to increased productivity, a major challenge in the current context of relocation and automation. In particular, it can shorten product development cycles by capturing exchanges between various engineering and manufacturing units, and directly applying changes to digital models of future products.

3. Human skills development

Industrial Metaverse has the potential to become an unparalleled training medium. Its 3D and immersive nature, combined with a digital toolkit and simulations of real situations that employees will (or could) face in the real world, make it the ideal environment for employees to practice and improve their skills.

Thus, digital twin can be used to train operators who will work in a future factory, which is under construction but already fully operational in the virtual world, or to adapt their work and positions to a virtual evolution of their workstation before its application in the real world. Immersion in these photorealistic twins raises the impact and anchoring of these manipulations by the operators to a much higher level than what is achieved in serious-game training.

Finally, the generation of synthetic photorealistic data makes it possible not only to train AI models on complex situations or situations that are impossible to configure in real life, but also to train operators to deal with crisis situations or to react to new configurations without impacting the real production tool.

4. Implementing industrial metaverse in an incremental approach

These first implementations must be designed in an incremental approach. In order to do this, it is necessary to adapt integration of digital assets and creation of content to the use case addressed. A common foundation is then initiated and enriched as the Industrial Metaverse is applied to new uses. Product customisation and improved customer service or monetisation of digital assets are also growing perspectives.

For the moment, the most interesting thing is to build up its foundation. A foundation capable of generating value immediately and extending widely thereafter to meet increasing number of uses.

Our real-time 3D industrial environment offer

To build the industrial Metaverse specific to each of our customers, and to remain consistent with this large-scale project whose development is incremental, we have developed an adapted approach, relying on practical expertise and technological building blocks along with ambitious partnerships that enable us to remain at the forefront of what we can offer to our customers. 

This approach allows us to offer our customers support in: