How enterprises can unlock the full potential of the industrial
metaverse.
Even as technologists are trying to envision what the metaverse will
bring for businesses and consumers, the industrial metaverse is
already transforming how people design, manufacture, and interact with
physical entities across industries.
“The industrial metaverse combines physical-digital fusion and human
augmentation for industrial applications and contains digital
representations of physical industrial environments, systems, assets
and spaces that people can control, communicate, and interact with.”
Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia
While definitions abound and it remains to be seen how the industrial
metaverse will fully unfold, digital twins are increasingly viewed as
one of its key applications. Used for everything from creating
ecosystems when planning a new city to working out iterations of
manufacturing processes, digital twins were first proposed in 2002 and
later became a vital technology when the fourth industrial revolution
(Industry 4.0) accelerated automation and digitization across industries.
Simply put, a digital twin is a virtual replica of a product or
process used to predict how the physical entity will perform
throughout its lifecycle.
BMW, for instance, created a virtual twin of its production plant in
Bavaria before building the physical facility. Boeing is using a
digital twin development model
to design its airplanes. And
“Virtual Singapore”
is a digital representation of the Southeast Asian nation that the
government created to support its policy decisions and test new
technologies. The increasing buzz surrounding digital twins is fueling
expectations for the industrial metaverse.
Raghav Sahgal, president of the cloud and network services business
at Nokia
According to ABI Research, revenues for industrial digital twin and
simulation and industrial extended reality will hit $22.73 billion by
2025 as organizations use Industry 4.0 tools such as artificial
intelligence (AI), machine learning, edge computing, and extended
reality to accelerate digital transformation.
Virtual spaces revenue (global)
- Consumer appeal driven
- Reliant on trends and network effect
- Fragmented monetization, with growth from 2026
Immersive collaboration and related cloud revenue (global)
- Business value driven
- Solution and device innovation
- Good monetization potential, with growth from 2025