Applying the Industrial Metaverse - 23102

There are many buzzwords working to capture the attention of those in industry today. Digital Twins (DT), and Metaverse are among current popular technology topics for industry. While these terms have become buzzwords, they still refer to real things and have real meaning - but it requires being specific when discussing their details and maturity level. A DT refers to a digital asset designed to live beside physical asset during its life cycle accurately reflect and providing insight using digital heuristics. Digital twins can range from a simple twin which compiles a dataset to capture reality aspects of an existing physical asset, to a mature, complex twin with two-way data integration to the physical asset which employs advanced algorithms to enable autonomous operations and maintenance. The industrial metaverse (IM) is the convergence of digital twin, internet of things (IoT), data ubiquity, artificial intelligence, and extended reality (XR) technologies (i.e., Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR)). Mixed Reality is an advanced user interface method that will serve as the human machine interface with this metaverse. Unlike virtual reality (VR) which immerses the user in a completely virtual environment, or augmented reality (AR) which layers virtual content on top of a physical environment, MR enables physical and virtual elements to interact in a mixed environment. MR allows the user to ingest data that is tied to their physical reality in real-time at the site of the work to be performed. MR tools (and similar Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR) tools) are already being used by industry to assist during preliminary design phases to save time and money by allowing users to engage with the design in an intuitive way. As these tools mature, they will be increasingly used by industry, and this creates an ever-growing pressure for the rise of cyber-physical systems (CPS) that combine both the physical and digital aspects of various systems in one package. CPS integrated with WiFi 6 and 5G will create an environment that is data ubiquitous and using traditional consumer off the shelf tools to interact with this data will prove to be inadequate. This paper will look at the path forward and the Digital Engineering framework needed to make the future vision of IM a reality. The growing Digital Engineering department at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is developing tools and tackling specific research questions that will enable the digital twin powered mixed reality needed to realize these future IM goals. The combination of MR with DT will provide a fundamentally new way of engaging with and understanding the complex systems of industry. (authors)