Introduction:
Envisage a digital world with factories, machines, buildings, cities and vehicles, and where an entire traffic is simulated to enable virtual testing. A report by MIT Technology Review in partnership with Siemens (2023) about the emergent industrial metaverse speaks of this and breaks the metaverse into three sectors: industrial, enterprise and consumer. The industrial sector is highly likely the biggest of those three, namely projected is that the enterprise ($30) and consumer market ($50) both do not even reach the projected marker of the industrial metaverse of $100 billion (MIT Technology review, 2023). The industrial metaverse will include technologies that are currently in rapid growth phases, all leading us toward industry 4.0. The industrial metaverse will be enabled by many different technologies: Digital twins, Iot, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud computing, 5G, blockchain, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Extended Reality (XR) (MIT Technology review, 2023).
The construction industry is part of the industrial sector, and it is not yet clear in research how it can benefit and enhance collaboration in the many processes involved. Related metaverse technologies like AR and VR will play and increasingly significant role in the construction sector of the future and are already seen the ideal technology as an information and communication tool between construction partners, especially for building maintenance and management in BIM modeled construction projects.
Research by Fan et al. (2022) defines the concept of Industrial Metaverse as a new digital twin system for the industrial economy. It utilizes various technologies such as digital twin, XR, non-fungible tokens, natural language processing and AI to simulate all aspects of the industrial process, including workers, machines, materials, production, maintenance, and economic activity (Fan et al., 2022). Industrial metaverse integrates industrial data with new technologies and enables decentralized sharing of digital resources (Fan et al., 2022)
Research has now begun with a main focus on the potential adoption in the Belgian construction industry. To stay updated with relevant findings, visit this page and stay in touch. Alternatively, you can follow Adaptable’s Linkedin page
Note: This research will be conducted from July through October 2023. This text is part of the research proposal for the Master Media Innovation at Breda University of Applied Sciences, written by Maurits Hagemans
Fan, W., Zhang, L., Li, N., & Song, X. (2022). Methods and Applications for Modeling and Simulation of Complex Systems. In Communications in computer and information science. Springer Science+Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9198-1
MIT Technology Review. (2023). The emergent industrial metaverse. https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/MITTR_Siemens_The-Emergent- Industrial-Metaverse.pdf
