Metaverse and 3D digital twin: Is it the same?
After Facebook announced on October 28 its plans to invest heavily in metaverse technologies over the coming decade, the number of apps that referenced the word metaverse grew 66% month-over-month by November. As of the end of November, 29 apps had been updated to include the word, more than double the 11 apps in October.
People are getting married in the metaverse now, we’re told. Speculators are buying real estate in it, according to the headlines. Managers must learn to hold meetings in the metaverse, it would seem. One slight hitch: it doesn’t exist yet, and it probably won’t anytime soon. What does exist is an idea, an explosion of hype, and a bevy of rival apps and platforms looking to capitalize on both — without a clear path between the idea and reality. In techland, 2021 wasn’t the year of the metaverse. It was the year of rebranding existing technologies as building blocks for the metaverse, while leaving intact the corporate walls that make a true metaverse impossible.
Hence the question: is the 3D digital twin technology from Infinite Foundry the Metaverse for Industry?
While definitions of the metaverse vary, most proponents agree it involves more than just putting on virtual reality goggles or augmented reality glasses and interacting with avatars. It is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3-D virtual worlds that persists through time and across platforms and devices. Indeed, interoperability — the working-together of many virtual worlds — is key to the concept.
On the other hand, 3D digital twin is the ground-breaking technology that for the first time allows to completely digitalize the industrial shop floor in all its three dimensions and in real-time, both for manual and automatic operations. As factories are interconnected supplying components and materials to each other, the 3D digital twins of each factory are interconnected and constantly exchanging quality and productivity data. 3D digital twin fully embraces the metaverse framing for industrial enterprise in which any factory can participate and take advantage of it to improve their productivity and competitiveness.
By André Luz
CEO Infinite Foundry