He was once Whatever BMW would rearrange a factory to build a new car, the only way the car manufacturer could check if the chassis would pass through the production line was to control a team and physically push the body through the process, taking note of all the hooks.
From now on, process engineers can simply run a simulation, by sending a 3D model of the car via an almost identical digital twin of the factory. All errors are spotted before building the production line, which saves time and money.
This is the power of the industrial metavese. Forget to send your avatar to virtual meetings with distant colleagues or nights of poker with distant friends, as Mark Zuckerberg was considering in 2021 when he changed the name of Facebook to meta; The Metaversse idea found its application Killer in manufacturing.
While the consumption version of the metavese has tripped, the industrial metavese should be worth $ 100 billion worldwide by 2030, according to a World Economic Forum report. In this context, the concept of the metavese refers to a convergence of technologies, including simulations, sensors, augmented reality and 3D standards. Varvn Aryacetas, leader in Deloitte's strategy and practice of innovation for the United Kingdom, prefers to describe it as a spatial calculation. “It's about filling the physical world with the digital world,” he says. This may include training in virtual reality, design of digital products and virtual simulations of physical space such as factories.
In 2022, Nvidia—The graphic entreprise of games which now feeds AI with its GPU – Inveled Omverse, a set of tools to build simulations, execute digital twins and food automation. It acts as a platform for industrial metavers. “This is general technology – it can be used for all kinds of things,” said Reverend Lebaredian, vice -president of omaverse and simulation technology at Nvidia. “I mean, representing the real world within a computer simulation is simply very useful for many things, but it is absolutely essential to build any system that contains autonomy.”
The Lowe's house improvement chain uses the platform to test new provisions in digital twins before building them in its physical stores. Zaha Hadid Architects creates virtual models of his remote collaboration projects. Amazon simulates warehouses to form virtual robots before letting real reach the ground. And BMW has built virtual models for all its sites, including its new factory in Debrecen, Hungary, which has been planned and tested practically before construction.
To simulate its entire manufacturing process, BMW has filled its virtual factories with 3D models from its cars, equipment and even people. He created these elements in an open source file format created by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (Openusd), Omverse providing the technical basis of virtual models and BMW creating its own software layers at the top, explains Matthias Mayr, specialist in the virtual factory at BMW.
“If you imagine a factory that would take half an hour to walk from one side on the other, you can imagine that it is also a fairly large model,” said Mayr. Therefore, turning to a technology game company – they know how to make scenes that you can go through. The first versions of the virtual factory even had navigation on the Wasd keyboard in game style, but it was abandoned in favor of an interface based on a click similar to the exploration of Google Street in a browser, so that everyone can easily find their way.
