Digital twin and Metaverse

In a world where everything is increasingly inclining to become digital and virtual, the Metaverse holds the power to transform our digital lives. It is a convergence of the real and virtual world where people can feel the real and vivid experiences of the digital world retreat to. In other words, Metaverse can also be touted as the next generation of the internet. As the next step in advancing the web and social media, the Metaverse brings us nearer to completely stimulated virtual reality through disruptive transformation. However, the Metaverse requires a digitalized copy of the real world as an entry point to provide fully connected, immersive, and engaging 3D experiences. So as going forward, the conversation around Metaverse intensifies. Many businesses and enterprises are now exploring and building on the metaverse-based fundamentals to introduce new possibilities and experiences for digitally-driven consumers. By deploying digital twins, organizations can introduce dimensionally precise real-life spaces into the metaverse virtual mirror world.

• What is Digital Twin?
• Why is Digital Twin an essential building block of Metaverse?
• How does Digital Twin work in the Metaverse?
• What are the use cases of Digital Twin in Metaverse?
• What is the impact of Digital Twin in Industry 4.0?

What is Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a virtual model of a process, product or service. This pairing of the virtual and physical worlds allows analysis of data and monitoring systems to head off problems before they even occur, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and even plan for the future by using simulations. A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or system in the digital world of the Metaverse. It is updated from real-time data and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision making. In simple words, creating a complex virtual model is the counterpart or twin of the physical object in the real world. With sensors that relay information and two-way internet of things (IoT) object connections, this technology can synchronize the digital environment with the physical world and vice versa. Any changes or movement in the material world is reflected in the digital representation of the twin.

Why is Digital Twin an essential building block of Metaverse?

The Metaverse and the Digital twin technology can bring realism into the virtual world and experiences beyond our imagination, creating exact replications of reality. Just imagine entering a virtual store of a fashion e-commerce company to try the clothes before buying them. It would be best suited for you to let your digital twin avatar try the clothes first to match your real measurements.

In a professional setting, a meeting in a metaverse-powered meeting room will be productive if participants of the virtual meeting can interact with a replica of the company’s instruments, equipment and information system. Similarly, a technical training program led by Metaverse will add value to the training if technicians can operate 3D representations of complex systems. Digital twin technology can drive all these ideas into reality and help build a metaverse that is more interviewed into reality. Digital twin and simulation technology will empower Metaverse to support remote maintenance workshops of machines that need to be serviced and potentially connected with or mapped onto a real workshop. These inartistic properties make digital twins one of the essential blocks of the Metaverse.

How does Digital Twin work in the Metaverse?

So to understand how Digital Twin works in the Metaverse, let’s take a look at how can incorporate digital twins into the Metaverse:

• Product:
  Digital twins used to design products
• Production:
  Digital twins are used to validate process manufacturing or production
• Performance:
  The performance digital twin captures the data from products in operation and analyzes it to provide actionable insight for informed decision-making.

The combination and integration of these three types of digital twins are known as digital threads. They can be woven into other products by collecting data at every product and production lifestyle stage. Engineers and developers synthesize physical, manufacturing, and operational data to create a digital twin. All this information, along with AI algorithms, is integrated into a physics-based virtual model, and by applying analytics into these models, the relevant insight regarding the physical asset. The consistent flow of data helps get the best analysis regarding the asset, making the digital twin act as a live model of the physical equipment.

What are the use cases of Digital Twin in Metaverse?

The Digital Twin concept can enhance the metaverse infrastructure globally. It will help determine and predict any physical asset’s current state and future state by analyzing its virtual or digital counterpart. By implementing digital twins in the Metaverse, organizations and enterprises can offer better insight into product performance and improve customer service. There are several sectors where the application of digital twins in the Metaverse can turn out to be beneficial; let’s look at some of those sectors as follows :

• Manufacturing: Digital twin technology is widely implemented in the manufacturing industry. Virtual copies of entire factories and plants ensure transparent production processes. The digital twin is poised to change the current face of the manufacturing sector in the Metaverse. Digital twins significantly impact how the products are designed, manufactured, and maintained, making them more efficient and optimized while reducing the throughout time
• Automobile: Digital Twins in the automobile sector can create a virtual model of a physically connected vehicle. It captures the behavioral and functional data of the vehicle and helps in analyzing the overall performance and connected features of the vehicle. Digital twin helps in delivering truly personalized customer service for the customers. In the future, Metaverse can be a platform for automobile expos, virtual showrooms, and their digital twin can help users to have real experience of automobiles through digital twins
• Retail: Appealing customers has become the key in the retail sector. Digital twin applied in Metaverse can play a key role in mounting the retail customer experience by creating 3D virtual models of showrooms and products, delivering customers a real-like experience. The digital twin also helps with better in-store planning, security implementation, and energy management in an optimized manner.
• Healthcare: The medical sector has benefitted from digital twins in organ donation, surgery training, and making other medical procedures less risky. Digital twins with data from IoT can play a vital role in healthcare by improving patient monitoring. It can provide preventive measures for the patients with personalized health care.
• Smart Cities: 3D digital twins of whole cities already exist, such as Virtual Singapore. Hence, smart city planning and implementation with digital twins in the Metaverse can help enhance economic development, effective management of human resources, and reduction of ecological footprint to increase the overall quality of life of a citizen in both the physical and virtual world.
• Industrial IoT: Industrial firms can monitor, track and control industrial systems digitally by implementing digital twins in the Metaverse. The digital twin records operational data and is handy in catching environment data such as location, configuration, financial models, etc., helping predict future operations of the industries.

What is the impact of Digital Twin in Industry 4.0?

Metaverse is discussed in today’s business world, particularly about Industry 4.0, which is credited for embracing automation, data exchange, and manufacturing technologies. Digital twins are the core of this new industrial revolution bringing unlimited possibilities for the future of the digital and virtual business world. It has changed the old traditional approach of ‘first build and then tweaks’ in the industrial world. Digital twins can provide Metaverse, a more virtual-based system design process with technological advancement, leading to a much more dynamic equipment or system. By providing the replica of the machines, the technology helps the virtual plant operators to understand its unique features, performance and potential issues, if any, on the virtual simulation model. Since the technology supports real-time monitoring of a physical plant, with the help of sensors attached to the whole setup, the operator gets the signal or prior alert of the machine failure and threats of downtime and accident. With the real-time operation updates in industry 4.0, industry workers are now capable of optimizing the performance of machines in real-time, monitoring the coordination between all the devices and performing diagnoses on virtual plants and repairing the faults with minimal productivity loss.

Endnote

If Metaverse is an idea of converging the virtual and real world, then the digital twin is one of the ways or technologies to materialize that idea. As more and more companies and enterprises use digital twins to build products and dApps in the Metaverse, they can build the entire ecosystem in the Metaverse with evolving time. A physical space can be quickly captured and turned into an accurate and immersive digital replica using 3D spatial data technology, digital twins, and simulation technology, along with other new-age deep technologies like Blockchain, AI, ML, IoT, and Cloud computing. Banking on the Metaverse developed by using digital twins technology. Businesses and enterprises can explore and virtually reach out to every space on the planet and enable the emergence of potentially limitless and countless future metaverse services.

We at LeewayHertz have a team of metaverse experts who can develop dApps and platforms for you to get started with Metaverse. Our team of engineers and developers is well experienced in creating a virtual replica of your physical assets with digital twins that will increase and expand the range of product and service offerings over your Metaverse.

We are happy to partner with you if you are looking to optimize or build a decentralized Blockchain Metaverse project. Please connect with our metaverse experts to discuss more.