Skip to main content
Loading...

Digital Twins and the Metaverse

metaverse
Submitted by Robyn Francis on December 4, 2022

Fidelity is not always important, it is about how you connect all the information up…plus other thoughts on the Metaverse and digital twins from members of our Digital Twin Hub & Taskforce.

Meta is fundamentally relying upon immersion and experience. You will never have a low-fidelity meta, it is driven by immersion. The digital twin is driven by connecting data, simulation and decision making is really key. It comes back to the use case and purpose of the twin.

These were some of the initial thoughts from some of the members at the Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Hub when recently asked them about the Metaverse in relation to the Digital Twin.

As one member put it “When it comes to the Metaverse you are going to be “in it” referring to the Metaverse as the “next level”.

Meta is very much driven by visualisation, and as we see wearables and wearable kits surfacing again we have many thinking about how this applies in terms of a Digital Twin.

One way to consider the Metaverse in this context is instead of saying what is the level of maturity of the twin we could say what is the level of depth you want to get into for each of the capabilities. For example, classifying the twin by saying it has a level 2 connection, a level 6 simulation etc Those levels can be more about the level of detail, level of analysis, or fidelity or frequency of update etc.

Are they two very distinct “things” or in some way are they the same “thing’ or could they be?

If you take a city-wide digital twin and start to introduce real-world meta with that then you are in one way back to joining it together. You have the wearables but unless you have that fabric and are retaining that fabric of the real-world environment in a digital space then how can people interact with that environment?

Ultimately you need to get the fundamentals right in the digital twin and really it comes down to ownership, who owns what, and what are your responsibilities when it comes to digital on top of the responsibilities in terms of the physical, and how would that enter in the Metaverse. What would that look like?

The advice from some of our members is to focus on getting the fundamentals in place and then you will be enabling what comes next.

However, consider this.

In the future, you might have robotic and AI-driven construction machinery that is helping us execute on work and someone goes into the Metaverse and knocks down your building and changes it to something else and then the robots in the real world look at the real world version and they go ahead and knock down the real building to get it to be the same as the metaverse which they consider as the correct version.

How connected are they or should they be? Who is authenticating the real world and meta world?