The Dream of the Metaverse Is Dying. Manufacturing Is Keeping It Alive

It used to be that when BMW would refit a factory to build a new car, the only way the automaker could check if the chassis would fit through the production line was to fly a team out and physically push the body through the process, making note of any snags.

Now, process engineers can simply run a simulation, sending a 3D model of the car through a near-identical digital twin of the factory. Any mistakes are spotted before the production line is built, saving time and money.

Such is the power of the industrial metaverse. Forget sending your avatar to virtual meetings with remote colleagues or poker nights with distant friends, as Mark Zuckerberg envisioned in 2021 when he changed Facebook’s name to Meta; the metaverse idea has found its killer app in manufacturing.

While the consumer version of the metaverse has stumbled, the industrial metaverse is expected to be worth $100 billion globally by 2030, according to a World Economic Forum report. In this context, the concept of the metaverse refers to a convergence of technologies including simulations, sensors, augmented reality, and 3D standards. Varvn Aryacetas, Deloitte’s AI strategy and innovation practice leader for the UK, prefers to describe it as spatial computing. “It’s about bridging the physical world with the digital world,” he says. This can include training in virtual reality, digital product design, and virtual simulations of physical spaces such as factories.

In 2022, Nvidia—the games graphics company that now powers AI with its GPUs—unveiled Omniverse, a set of tools for building simulations, running digital twins, and powering automation. It acts as a platform for the industrial metaverse. “This is a general technology—it can be used for all kinds of things,” says Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia. “I mean, representing the real world inside a computer simulation is just very useful for a lot of things—but it’s absolutely essential for building any system that has autonomy in it.”

Home improvement chain Lowe’s uses the platform to test new layouts in digital twins before building them in its physical stores. Zaha Hadid Architects creates virtual models of its projects for remote collaboration. Amazon simulates warehouses to train virtual robots before letting real ones join the floor. And BMW has built virtual models for all its sites, including its newest factory in Debrecen, Hungary, which was planned and tested virtually before construction.

To simulate its entire manufacturing process, BMW filled its virtual factories with 3D models of its cars, equipment, and even people. It created these elements in an open-source file format originated by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), with Omniverse providing the technical foundation for the virtual models and BMW creating its own software layers on top, explains Matthias Mayr, virtual factory specialist at BMW.

“If you imagine a factory that would take half an hour to walk from one side to the other side, you can imagine it’s also quite a large model,” Mayr says. Hence turning to a gaming company for the technology—they know how to render scenes you can run through. Early versions of the virtual factory even had gaming-style WASD keyboard navigation, but this was dropped in favor of a click-based interface akin to exploring Google Street View in a browser, so anyone could easily find their way.