They said the industrial metaverse–which refers to the digital world that mirrors the physical world, leveraging the technologies–has found the right price points to generate good returns on investment (RoI) with supporting technologies scaling up.
“Industrial metaverse has gone through its waves,” said Sreenivasa Chakravarti, vice president, IOT and digital engineering, TCS. “As always (with any new technology), there is a hype when it peaks, and then it slows down and then again it picks up. Today, because the industrial metaverse is in some way a combination of computer vision, extended reality and digital twins, fortunately, all of these are maturing to a really good extent.”
He further said, “Therefore, we are seeing a lot more positive application of metaverse (in industries). In the recent past, we have seen a few pilots being done by different companies. Today we are seeing a scaled deployment of metaverse.”
Chakravarti said the convergence and maturing of technologies such as AI, IOT, cloud and extended reality have given the industry the right price points. Since all of these are very data heavy and require analytics in real time, the industrial metaverse got a boost from supporting technologies, he said, adding, “We will see a fairly significant acceleration in the industrial metaverse in the next few years.”
“We have to allow new technologies to settle in and find their take-off point,” he said. “Sometimes we get over excited about a new technology and it goes through a rough patch. But they have very powerful capabilities which will find their feet.”
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Pareekh Jain, chief executive of EIIRTrend engineering insight platform, said while the metaverse on the consumer side didn’t pick up because of macroeconomic slowdown, especially in the telecom sector, on the industrial side, it is picking up now.“Industrial enterprises are keen to experiment with the metaverse as supporting technologies are more mature now,” he said. “Industrial metaverse is the evolution of industrial IoT, simulation, digital twin, digital thread, analytics, cloud, connectivity, along with GenAI. Enterprises hope they can get better RoI now on their past digital investments with the advent of the Industrial metaverse and GenAI.”
Another reason for the uptick in metaverse adoption, according to experts, is the shortening of the innovation cycle to six months to a year.
Speaking at the IET Future Tech Congress, Ramakrishna Srinivasa, vice president, DCX – India, Capgemini, said speaking at the IET Future Tech Congress (FTC), said, “For industrial metaverse to play a larger role, having right sensors in place, edge computing, having the complete IOT ecosystem, data and analytics and augmented reality – all these five or six things have come together to give life to industrial metaverse.”
All these technologies are becoming a reality, after being more of a hype for more than a decade, Srinivasa said. “When 5G came a decade back, there were questions about it. Today everyone uses 5G. All these things have come to scale,” he said.
