Many organizations across the globe are seeing the potential opportunities of having a presence in the Metaverse and are beginning to prepare their digital assets accordingly. With rapid expansion and more details coming to light on the value the Metaverse may bring, innovative business leaders must start evaluating if their organization is prepared.
We all know the world has changed significantly in the wake of the pandemic, and companies are leaping toward hyperautomation. Are digital twins of headquarters, products, stores, and even customers and employees the next wave? Many experts seem to think so, and this piece will take a deeper look into why.
It may feel that we spend our whole lives adapting in our personal life and business. Every few years, something happens that completely transforms the landscape of business operations – whether it be enormous technological advances or life-altering events like we just experienced.
The Metaverse is one of these technological advancements where business leaders may have never seen themselves going. It sounded like something just for the movies or the video game industry a few years ago. Learning about digital twins and where they fit into the Metaverse equation can help business leaders see the potential impact on their everyday operations.
A Deeper Dive into Digital Twins
Per Gartner Inc., “a digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. The implementation of a digital twin is an encapsulated software object or model that mirrors a unique physical object, process, organization, person or other abstraction. Data from multiple digital twins can be aggregated for a composite view across a number of real-world entities, such as a power plant or a city, and their related processes.”
In many ways, the Metaverse is a digital twin of our world and reality as we know it. To be built up, the Metaverse will need to be filled with digital twins of different objects – buildings, trees, wildlife, cars, and people. Eventually, on a larger scale and already underway, digital twins are being used for real business and transactions.
Digital twins rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence to be updated in real-time with up-to-date data. Fire response teams for California wildfires used digital twins to simulate natural fires and study patterns to help prepare firefighters for their response. That practice provides very little help to the response teams without accurate and real-time data.
In maintenance, professionals utilize digital twins to understand different parts of a machine to help make productive fixes when a machine failure occurs. Without real-time data, that same maintenance team would be back fixing the same machine weeks later, costing the company dollars in downtime and reworks.
Although it is quite tough to predict how the Metaverse will operate on a business level in years to come, bringing in experts to discuss a plan for creating digital twins is a smart move to expand your knowledge of the problems it can help you fix.
Examples of Digital Twins Inside the Metaverse
The ability to see a holistic view of your factories is a prevalent use case for virtual reality (VR). Business leaders and operation managers can gain comprehensive insights into their production process by viewing digital twins of their plants and manufactured products. Visualizing the process within the scope of VR can allow them to evaluate and gain insights into production they never had before – ultimately allowing them to implement changes that save money and time.
We have all shopped online before and likely had to make some returns as a result. Well, retail and E-commerce companies are aware of the ease of shopping at home but also know the hardships of identifying if a particular item is a fit or not. Virtual storefronts allow consumers to interact with digital twins of the products they buy on a whole new level to make intelligent purchasing decisions. On top of that, they can stay on their couch while they do it!
Many people on the business side miss face-to-face interactions but are also fed up with video conferencing. Digital twins of ourselves, often called avatars, allow people to get a comfortable in-between. Customers can remain in their home office as they visit you and your team at your brand-new virtual headquarters.
Connecting data sources will enrich digital twins of customers and products, so your client-facing teams are prepared with real-time intelligence on your client’s contract and enhancements in the product you are selling. Doing so gives your teams a considerable step up in their preparation and knowledge on a particular sale. Suppose a demo needs to be adapted and presented more personalized to a potential lead. In that case, your team will have this knowledge and have artificial intelligence inside the Metaverse to thank for it.
