Is the industrial metaverse worth writing home about?

17 December, 2024

Regulatory changes

Without getting too excited too soon, ensuring interoperability in the metaverse does have its challenges. It requires widespread agreement on standards, unlike the collaborative origins of the internet with foundational standards like HTML and TCP/IP. Metaverse building blocks operate differently, using various rendering engines and file formats that make post-facto standardisation complex.

Therefore, the rapidly evolving metaverse space requires regulatory standards to ensure safety, fairness and interoperability. In Europe, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) have recently been implemented to promote fair competition and prevent anticompetitive practices among digital platforms. This can indirectly benefit the industrial metaverse by encouraging interoperability and data sharing between different platforms and services. As the industrial metaverse requires, this would make it easier for systems and processes to connect and exchange data seamlessly.

Open source

Regulatory standards are typically established through government agencies, industry associations and international bodies. However, market competition can put pressure on getting standards to pass.

When doing so, it is essential to encourage collaboration among the various stakeholders in the metaverse community. This collaboration would ideally lead to the development of standards that benefit the entire community rather than favouring specific players. A way that supports industry collaboration is open source.

This is a software model where the source code of a program is made available to the public, which would allow companies to contribute towards developing interoperable options, ensuring the metaverse’s infrastructure is accessible and adaptable.

For instance, developers could build upon existing functionality, introduce new features and integrate emerging technologies. These could, for example, include AI, blockchain and spatial computing. With that in mind, the possibilities are truly endless. But the metaverse is not a reality yet, and we’ve been talking about these technologies since the term metaverse was coined in 1992, by author Neal Stephenson. While we can get excited by the whole thing, especially in the industrial realm, manufacturers must look after and upgrade their current processes in the meantime. To start this process, establishing a trusted industrial equipment supplier is a crucial first step.

Be it for the monitoring of current equipment or wanting to build accurate digital twins, receiving parts like Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) can help manufacturers save on costs, increase efficiency and reduce downtime. By sourcing parts manufacturers can lay the foundations for the metaverse future. And by doing so, they will initiate the process of gathering and effectively managing data from their equipment, serving as a means to bridging the physical and digital realms of the industrial landscape.

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