While the very concept of Metaverse and what constitutes it continues to be defined, its potential to unleash the next wave of digital disruption is obvious, especially in the infrastructure space.
“We believe Metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet… We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” ~ Mark Zuckerberg, October 28, 2021
Metaverse has become the most widely bandied neologisms ever since the Facebook CEO laid out his vision and rechristened the social media giant to Meta.
Although the concept of Metaverse has existed long before Zuckerberg actually created the hype and gave it a ‘consumerist’ spin — several organizations experimented with and attempted to successfully implementing it in pilot phase across in various spheres.
“Many people think of the Metaverse in terms of social and gaming experiences. But businesses have always explored the potential of virtual or augmented realities,” says Juergen Dold, Executive Vice President, Hexagon.
He explains that the real-time 3D visualizations that companies like Hexagon are creating are actually solving real-world problems, as they are anchored in the physical world — a street, a construction site, a factory, a park, a building, even products like cars and phones.
And because today’s Metaverse is an evolution of the virtual universe of the past, its use and significance in all things related to infrastructure — be it construction of standalone buildings, transport infrastructure or even entire cities — is obvious.
For instance, as Benson Chan, Chief Operating Officer, Strategy of Things, explains, in its simplest form, the Metaverse is the digital extension of the smart city. The city’s Metaverse is an online version of the city and works in lockstep alignment with the physical city and community.
“Smart cities utilize the physical data from its many sensors, building information models, digital infrastructure and geospatial information, to replicate and create models in the Metaverse that enable it to work and behave like the physical city.”
Similarly, the Metaverse, also known as the Web 3.0 is a collection of digital data that represents the real-world and enables more intuitive, immersive, interaction with that data. The Metaverse for construction, or the Industrial Metaverse, is really just an iteration of the ‘digital twin’ concept.
“An immersive representation of the physical and digital worlds combined as one that enables us to better understand how these representations of a given project interact with one another,” says Nathan Patton, Product Marketing Manager, Strategy & Innovation, Trimble.
The connection between the digital world and the physical world in which Metaverse interaction provides different complex systems in the same space. Thus, the flow of data is understood to make better decisions to manage the infrastructure to obtain solutions.
“Multiple assets create something unique and entirely new by collecting real-time data and gaining insights,” elaborates Henrique Reis, 3D Geospatial Analyst (Digital Twins) at AAM.
What is the Metaverse?
The Metaverse can be most succinctly defined as the next stage in the evolution of the internet, where boundaries between the physical and the virtual merge.
But it is a bit more complex. Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi explains, the Metaverse is a progression of the internet from something that’s 2D to fully immersive 3D.
The ‘fully immersive 3D’ is the underlying factor here.
“The media types on the internet have gone from text to images, to video, and now we have all the technology to enable immersive 3D experiences,” he adds.
And that is why, as Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA had recently said, the combination of AI and computer graphics will power the Metaverse.
“It’s a 3D embodied Web, where we can connect inside virtual worlds that look and feel to us as rich and complex as the real world. We can play, socialize, work and create within these interoperable worlds despite being separated by great distances in the real world,” elaborates Jeff Kember, Director, Omniverse Technologies, NVIDIA.
Naturally, many Metaverse experiences will also be in a digital twin of the real world, whether that be for productivity applications for work, or it be monitoring a construction site, or it be training for GEOINT purposes.
The underlying technologies, such as 3D, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), digital twins or real-time streaming, have finally matured and are converging.
Graphic courtesy of Strategy of Things“In many ways, the Metaverse we are talking about is the ultimate modeling and simulation environment with the pieces finally coming together,” emphasizes Nadine Alameh, CEO, Open Geospatial Consortium.
While the very concept of Metaverse and what constitutes it continues to be defined, its potential to unleash the next wave of digital disruption is obvious.
Mckinsey estimates that in the first five months of 2022, more than USD 120 billion have been invested in Metaverse technology and infrastructure, which is more than double the USD 57 billion invested in all of 2021.
Geospatial Foundational to Metaverse
If the Metaverse has to be a realtime representation of the physical world, it’s a no-brainer that the concept of location or geography is central to that idea. Everything about the Metaverse is geospatial, emphasizes Alameh.
“You need to know where you are; where things are; where things are relative to each other,” she says.
Staying tethered to our real geography – not just accurate coordinates but everything, the real environment, around us — will be essential if we want to capitalize on the full potential of what is envisioned as the Metaverse.
Imagine, while planning a city you are able to not only model but also experience the changes to the city’s physical environment such as traffic congestion, environmental emissions, and sea level rise. Or imagine constructing a building actually seeing the view from the windows of your new office.
“Geospatial information will be fundamental to combining the technology that propagates through the command of the physical world to make us understand different environments.
This social-digital interaction is intrinsically geospatial and will rely heavily on interoperability to combine data/information to gain new insights, interactive actions of digital twin technologies for modelling and simulation that affect the real world,” says Reis.
Digital realities already handle air traffic; autonomous trains already move between terminals. Now, imagine first responders never making a wrong turn; industrial plants predicting and performing maintenance; or autonomous technologies making mines and construction sites completely safe and sustainable; elaborates Dold.
And this is being made possible by advances in technology that will help city leaders to quickly solve the problem of infrastructure system to improve operations and maintain efficiency in resource analysis, saving cost to develop different strategies to provide quality of life for citizens from a certain place.
Metaverse for Smart Cities
One of the biggest lessons from the pandemic is that we need a fresh take on the nature of real estate as cities across countries. Seoul is one of the first cities to announce plans for a Metaverse in 2021 with a virtual communication ecosystem for municipal administration.
Similarly, China has invested in exploring the Metaverse in Shanghai. Santa Monica, California in the United States offers a Metaverse experience for tourists. Recently, on October 15, Dubai announced a Metaverse strategy.
Dubai also recently announced a Higher Committee for Future Technology and Digital Economy, which will play an integral part in the city’s mission to spearhead the Metaverse and Web3.
Many more cities are engaging with technologies related to the Metaverse, such as digital twins, blockchain, and IoT to help them with hosting municipal events, tourism, or even post NFTs in virtual spaces that could then appear on real apartment walls!
However, for most cities, these technologies are more useful and interesting than the more immersive versions of the Metaverse that currently exist, thinks Lena Geraghty, Director of Sustainability and Innovation, Center for City Solutions.
Here, big cities that are often on the cutting edge of technological innovation will likely continue to invest in a more immersive version of the Metaverse.
Geraghty thinks many other cities will also continue to incorporate IoT and digital twins into their operations as these tools become more accessible and as their utility is further explored.
“Technologies such as digital twins have tremendous potential to help cities with a range of goals, from planning for infrastructure changes to lowering building emissions. They allow city leaders to view their cities with a granularity that allows them to play out hypothetical scenarios to anticipate specific impacts of new buildings, street changes, or other land use decisions. Cities, including Boston, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, have already invested in this technology.”
Chan points to an interesting angle. Cities have long faced challenges with providing equity, accessibility and quality of life for vulnerable residents, and with the pandemic resetting smart city priorities, these once again have emerged on top of the agenda.
Mobility issues have limited senior citizens and physically disabled residents from fully accessing services, visiting businesses and attending events. Residents in lower socio-economic communities do not have the same services as other areas have, nor do they have the same access to quality education and health services.
While the Metaverse cannot solve all these challenges fully, Chan believes its immersive nature offers the potential to make a meaningful impact in ways not possible before.
“For example, senior citizens and physically disabled residents with limited physical mobility, are no longer restricted in where they can go or do. In the Metaverse, they can visit and engage with friends, attend classes and events, exercise, access services, and do so in ways that are similar to in-person activities.
City leaders and managers can use the Metaverse to host more effective community engagement and collaboration meetings with its residents and businesses,” he explains.
The Metaverse could also change how people return to work in a post-pandemic world.
However, cities also must be proactive in considering how the Metaverse will impact them. “We have seen that new technology can provide innovative solutions to better cities when local leaders plan for it but can also be detrimental to cities when it arrives without foresight,” Geraghty says.
Metaverse for Construction
Digital twins are already an integral part of construction processes. The immersive side of Metaverse will further drive a desire for better ways of interacting with the data that describes a construction project, points out Trimble’s Patton.
And that applies to not only in the typical sense of immersing ourselves in 3D models but also in the digital representation of the project schedule, the costs, the materials, and the timeline.
“All of these things are digital representations of the construction project that I feel will be made more intuitive through some iteration of the Metaverse. For example, a legal title for a building is signed over as a paper document that is recorded in a county’s ledger, in the future the digital data will represent the building itself and can be sold and verified through the Blockchain as opposed to a physical library,” he explains.
Agrees Stephanie Lin, Senior Director, Global Retail Strategy at Matterport. “From real estate, architecture, design, engineering, retail, travel and hospitality, we know that giving virtual access to physical space has tremendous value.”
Replicating real-world environments adds a completely new level of authenticity and reliability to the countless simulations and training sessions. This can range from immersive job training for difficult or hazardous conditions to severely cutting down the carbon footprint and pollution generated by humans today.
Being able to test and validate a Metaverse proof of- concept prior to physical world execution can be immensely valuable and cost-saving.
Simulation brings enormous opportunity for all enterprises as simulating projects thousands of times virtually before producing, in reality, will save on cost and waste, and increase operational efficiency and accuracy.
“Applying accurate physical simulation to the digital twin gives us incredible superpowers. We can teleport to any part of the digital twin just like we can in a video game, and inspect any aspect of it reflected from the real world. We can also run simulations to predict the near future, or test many possible futures for us to pick the most optimal one,” says Kember of NVIDIA.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse is a prominent example in this area, and already powering several businesses — whether by DNEG or Sony Pictures Animation to build accelerated USD media and entertainment workflows; by Foster + Partners or KPF to bring architectural design to the next level; by Ericsson to create a digital twin of a city for 5G deployment optimization; by BMW Group for building factories of the future; or by Lockheed Martin to build simulation environments to better predict wildfire spread.
Cozzi gives the example of the work Cesium does with its partner Komatsu — creating digital twin of the construction site.
“We envision a future where you may have an operator on site wearing AR glasses, seeing overlays of stockpiled volumes and cut film maps, and they’d be connected to someone off site wearing VR and both pointing at the same areas and maybe a third person in an operations center with a big screen,” he says.
Similarly, the Matterport digital twins are ready-made for the Metaverse. “Through our partner platform, augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are integrating with digital twins to create seamless and immersive experiences in these digital environments. We believe digital twins can be one of the core foundations for building the Metaverse,” explains Lin.
Is Metaverse Enhanced Virtual Reality?
It seems no! As Cozzi explains, the Metaverses will be much more than VR. VR will be one way to engage with the Metaverse just like your phone today is one way to engage with the internet, but you also engage with the Metaverse through AR wearables and through your laptop and phone as you know it today.
“For example, we do work for digital twins of the construction site while we work with Komatsu. And we envision a future where you may have an operator on site wearing AR glasses, seeing overlays of stockpiled volumes and cut film maps, and they’d be connected to someone off site wearing VR and both pointing at the same areas and maybe a third person in an operations center with a big screen,” he elaborates.
Chan explains that interpretation is a bit simplistic of what makes a Metaverse. “From a technology perspective, digital twins and VR/AR are some of the more top of mind components that enable the Metaverse, but it’s not the sole component,” he says.
Geraghty concurs: “These technologies are iterations of what the Metaverse may one day become. Technologies like 3D modeling and digital twins are developments that move towards blending the physical and digital worlds, which is what the Metaverse posits to do. As technology advances, these tools may improve to become even more lifelike and useful in various sectors.”
However, Patton largely agrees that the ‘Industrial Metaverse’ will be an iteration of the digital twin concept with deeper interaction, collaboration, and immersive capabilities. “Essentially, it seeks to be the Digital Twin concept actually realized.”
The concept of the ‘Industrial Metaverse’ is really no different than these other iterations of virtual worlds that we’ve seen in the past, but now the emphasis is to introduce genuine value in other vertical areas of opportunity.
Computers were originally seen as devices geared towards only gaming, but over time, the technology advanced to the point where there were more tangible benefits that extended into business (advanced calculation, digital visualization of information, etc.) that made it a bonafide requirement for successful operations. The same is happening to immersive technologies now, Patton says.
Future Economic Impact
Now that we have the technology to create true-to-reality digital twins of the physical world, this evolution of the web will be much larger than ever before.
Creators will make more things for virtual worlds than they do in the physical world, enterprises will build countless digital twins of products, environments and spaces — from object scale to planetary scale, says Kember.
There are estimates that the economic impact of the Metaverse will touch USD 1 trillion in the next few years. Gartner has predicted that one in every four consumers will be using the Metaverse for at least an hour each day by 2026.
The next era of industries and AI will be enabled by the Metaverse — these interoperable virtual worlds. For one, 3D workflows are now essential to every industry.
After all everything that we design and build are typically first built in a virtual world. Be it a car, or bridge, or factory or a city — everything is first designed with various CAD tools, before they are built.
Dold thinks as more and more users adopt these innovations — and because companies continue to make advanced technologies easier to use – these solutions become suitable for an ever-widening base of users, extending beyond traditional industrial or governmental customers, to entertainment, healthcare and fashion.
“Imagine we can model our entire earth and ecosystem and do simulations to understand the impact of policies on climate change; from local to global and global to local,” says Alameh.
The Metaverse can help us better connect with the world around us, interact more deeply, and get to the root of issues. There will be a larger market, larger industry with more designers and creators building digital things in virtual worlds.
And just like the initial internet did, Web 3.0 will spark many new economies, larger than our current physical economy.
