Facebook went all-in on the "metaverse" a year and a half ago. The company changed its name to Meta and began pumping $XNUMX billion a month into a Hail Maryboondoggle to get relevant to the oncoming post-social blog planet.
Now Meta finds itself entering a "metaverse winter," a general drop in investment and enthusiasm around the idea. Meta itself has laid off thousands of people in its metaverse and social enterprises.
The metaverse is not a set of technologies; it is a vision of future human culture. It's about what product companies and the public could do with a set of technologies, primarily live and work in virtual spaces and play in virtual worlds.
Apple has been developing what it calls "extended reality" hardware for two decades and is now expected to launch its first glasses later this year. The glasses will have virtual reality (VR) capability, but Apple will highlight AR (AR).
Apple now has a quarter of the business PC market, half of the business smartphone market and a majority of the business tablet market. An underrated question: how is Apple going to leverage its extended reality platforms to extend its dominance in the company?
It's a reasonable prediction that over the next 5 years, Apple will focus on corporate communications (the bionic boardroom) and other white-collar applications, industrial design, and you guessed it! — the next “digital twin” revolution. There is no virtual reality or AR without 3D virtual spaces and virtual objects, which must be designed and built and, in the case of AR, put into a digitized scan of the actual 3D environment.
The most advanced version of all this technology for navigating virtual spaces and conjuring up virtual objects on the real world—and designing, building, and digitizing—is going to happen not just for the “metaverse,” but for the benefit of form platforms as well. “digital”. Twins". .
Digital twins: when failure is not an option
On April 3, XNUMX, XNUMX astronauts were in a spaceship hurtling toward the moon at four hundred miles per minute. The plan was to make NASA's third manned moon landing. Suddenly, the astronauts aboard Apollo XNUMX heard a "bang!" It was the sound of a small explosion that blew off the side of the spacecraft, cutting off its power and launching the crew's oxygen supply into space.
With no fresh air to replenish the cabin, the astronauts rushed to the Lunar Module (LM), the separate, detachable spacecraft designed to land on the moon while the parent craft remained in lunar orbit.
The landing was cancelled. From this moment on, the mission had only one goal: to somehow bring the astronauts back to Earth alive. To do this, the crew had to reuse and redesign different parts of their spacecraft to do many things those parts weren't designed to do.
In the end, their lives were saved in part by the fact that NASA had what was essentially the only "digital twin" system on the planet.
A “digital twin” is a virtual replica of an existing physical object, system, or infrastructure. In the case of NASA, this materialized in fifteen simulators used for training and to test the factors of the mission. NASA engineers used the simulators' computer simulation capabilities to figure out what was wrong, test a plurality of possible solutions, and select the best one, which they passed on to the Apollo crew.
The term caught on so much that NASA deliberately began creating "digital twins" of spacecraft separate from the simulators. NASA coined the term "digital twin" in XNUMX.
A “digital twin” is not an inert model. It is a customized, customized, and scalable digital or virtual model of a physical system. It is active in the sense that whatever happens to the physical system also happens to the digital twin: repairs, upgrades, damage, aging, etc.
Companies are already using "digital twins" for integration, testing, monitoring, simulation, and predictive maintenance on bridges, buildings, wind farms, aircraft, and factories. But this is still only the beginning in the field of the “digital twin”.
How to understand digital twins
A digital twin system has 3 parts: the physical system, the virtual digital copy of that physical system, and a communication channel that connects the two. Little by little, this communication involves the transmission of data from sensors in the physical system.
It is made up of 3 main categories of technologies. If you imagine a Venn diagram of "metaverse" technologies in one circle, "IoT" in a second circle, and "AI" in the third, "digital twin" technology occupies the overlapping center. Digital twins differ from models or simulations in that they are considerably more complex and extensive, and change with incoming data from the physical twin.
The digital twin implementations that exist in many industries today are all in their infancy. Detailed digital twins remain impossible for complex systems. We're still waiting for better AI, better sensors, and better tools like the ones we think will power the "metaverse."
Let's look back a few years to see how digital twins will serve as the cornerstone of digital business transformation.
It's the year XNUMX and a delivery drone company is betting on digital twins, creating a separate digital twin for each of the fifteen zero drones in service in major cities around the world. Each real part of each individual drone is individually mapped to a digital and virtual counterpart. Dozens of sensors embedded throughout the physical drone measure temperature, humidity, vibration, wing stress, and the operational efficiency of moving parts. The conditions of the drone itself: altitude, speed, direction, external humidity levels and many other measurements, update the digital drone in real time. All this data is fed into the digital drone, changing its operations and affecting its virtual state.
Suddenly, one of the drones falls from the sky and crashes. But why?
Engineers working from home wear virtual reality goggles and display the digital twin of the crashed drone in a high-resolution 3D shared virtual environment. They reproduce the accident while moving around in the drone, which displays 3D copies of all parts as contextual data based on sensors, essentially AR within VR. They quickly realize that the rudder supervisor has failed due to overheating.
In a normal aviation scenario, all fifteen zero controllers would be replaced at sky-high cost and with no guarantee that the new controllers would not fail as well. But in the digital twin scenario, there is a better way.
Digital twins to the rescue
In association with AI, engineers determine that this particular monitor failed due to the fact that it was operating in Phoenix, AZ, where ground temperatures can top XNUMX degrees in the shade and rise higher in full sun. Repeated heating, cooling, and heating over time have worn away a chemical adhesive on the supervisor.
Improvement! The company also maintains a digital twin of its drone factory: a detailed virtual replica of the entire system, updated in real time by countless sensors in every part of the physical factory. So you can track the history of the particular failed sensor, where the AI points out that it was made in the summer and was in the top 5 percentiles of achieving high temperatures throughout the assembly. It sounds like the damaging heat stress probably started at the factory.
Like a chess computer, the AI considers fifty-seven "moves" or possible antidotes, and advises the safest and most profitable: 1) craft any and all future overseer pieces in winter and save them for assembly; two) move to a more heat resistant adhesive on the part; and three) precautionary replacement of the supervisor of the other forty-seven drones that operate in warm weather.
In this case, the use of the digital twin system saved money, prevented accidents, helped the environment (by not requiring the replacement of each and every supervisor part), and made positive changes to operations and manufacturing without downtime. of the plant or the drone.
It is the culmination of the digital transformation revolution, using advanced technologies for agility, cost effectiveness, speed and security.
It is time to repurpose the advantages of the technologies that we always talk about. The IoT is becoming a critical technology. AI teams up with engineers to optimize every process in real time. And AR and VR bring digital twins to life just as vividly as their physical counterparts.
Virtual spaces aren't just about creating metaverse fantasy worlds. They will be better used to prosper the actual planet.
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