The general public think of the metaverse in terms of avatars that exaggerate a user’s features and interact in a virtual environment. Technologists, by comparison, refer to digital assets, distributed systems and web3.0 concepts.
Meanwhile, thought leaders scope the metaverse in terms of key principles. One is interoperability, a system property that allows avatars to port from one digital environment to another. A second is the concept of persistence. That means a digital world experience continues even when a participant drops out. The implication in a gaming environment, for example, is to remove the possibility for a player’s character to “die.” No longer can a player restart the game to gain practice and improve their score. These differing viewpoints and references to features of the metaverse shows that the concept remains in a state of evolution. Progress depends on convergence of definitions, rules, and standards.
From a strategic perspective, wider considerations will have profound market development implications. For example, regulators and competition authorities worry about the manipulation of consumers on social-media platforms, an early form of the metaverse. Financial authorities are concerned about digital assets, which might affect asset values in the physical world, because of digital-to-physical exchanges and potentially disruptive decentralized payments systems. On a philosophical level, can there be only one metaverse rather than several isolated ones? This debate raises questions about technical interoperability and industry attitudes to open-standardization approaches. The trajectory for such developments currently depends on two types of metaverse.
Two metaverse categories
In a recent debate about How the EU Should Approach the Metaverse, the European Member of Parliament, Dragos Tudorache, defined two metaverse categories. One applies to consumers and their avatar presences in digital worlds. An example from the field of education involves a science student “walking” around a digitally rendered and interactive plant and playing a game to see how well they can nurture it. In time, novel interfaces and sensors will improve touch and smell feedback sensations.
The second and more advanced category applies to industrial users. Here, a simple metaverse might involve an immersive training experience. This is where technicians use an augmented reality application to experience a complex maintenance procedure in a controlled environment before they tackle any real-world repairs. Early industrial applications correspond to more contained types of metaverse. Since these are already delivering value to industrial users, they represent a point of departure on the roadmap to more complex use cases.
IoT and the metaverse
An important distinction between industrial and consumer metaverses is the connection between physical and virtual worlds. Immersive games for consumer applications can bend the laws of physics. That is how avatars can levitate while players are able to “die” and quickly be “recreated.”
The situation is vastly different in the industrial sector. A simulated engine or a digital twin representing a smart city’s infrastructure depend on the close connection between physical and virtual worlds. IoT sensors, connected devices and interoperable data models are therefore critical components of industrial metaverses.
The importance of digital twins cannot be overstated. An accurate representation of a machine and how it responds to control signals is important for training purposes. In the case of predictive maintenance use cases, a digital twin mimics the behavior of a “healthy” machine. Comparing the dynamic behavior of a device and its digital twin allows operational staff to detect the onset of failure and to schedule preventative maintenance. As an illustration, consider the example of an automatic door in a sub-way train or an elevator. Let us say that the pattern of a door’s opening and closing movement deviates from the prediction of its digital twin. Between the cyber and the physical systems, an automated system would detect speed or jerkiness differences. This might trigger an alert about an incipient motor failure or the need for cleaning to remove an obstruction. Allowing technicians to enter this industrial metaverse and visualize what might be happening can also lower the cost of human validation and prevent unnecessary shutdowns.
Metaverse standardization and challenges
Many entities – train operators, suppliers of the automated door, service technicians and others - are involved in the simple automated door example. While a separate set of organizations is involved with lifts in buildings, both scenarios share similarities in the procedures to monitor IoT data, in making digital-twin comparisons and, in dispatching notifications. These are a few of the areas where standardization makes a difference. Technical standards provide a common language and set of technical capabilities that different organizations can depend on. Standardization also leads to re-usable solutions which saves on development costs.
Recognizing the importance of metaverse standardization, multiple industry alliances are forming. Among others, these include the Metaverse Standards Forum and the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group. They face many challenges as discussed at a recent symposium on 6G systems, whose advanced communications capabilities will be foundational to metaverse applications. One of the speakers was Jesse Alton who is known as @mrmetaverse. He shared his ten-year journey towards launching the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group and recent standardization efforts on interoperable avatars. He explained that the process of consensus-building and standardization was relatively straightforward. All that was required was an agreement on file types. He did point out that much stiffer challenges lie ahead. For example, how will industry players agree on interoperability standards for portals, or walled garden metaverses? Would service providers agree on a standard for location information to support teleporting in the digital universe? These issues raise the question of whether participants could agree on scalable and industry-wide standards if alliance approaches restrict participation or operate on “pay-to-play” models.
These are not theoretical issues. A consumer metaverse example illustrates the challenges and opportunities that will emerge in industrial settings. Consider the case of a digital sword for a warrior avatar. Several artisans might participate in making, decorating, and selling that sword. Each stage of the process lends itself to a system of fractional payments. Everybody could easily get their “cut” in a given metaverse’s “on-chain” payments system. The same model applies to condition monitoring insights from a machine in a manufacturing facility. However, the co-dependent model breaks down if participants cannot work to an agreed standard. This is also the case if process steps are not integrated and when there is a need to transfer information or digital assets across metaverse boundaries.
The close interdependencies between metaverse and IoT sectors motivated oneM2M, the global standards body for interoperable IoT systems, to launch an initiative exploring these issues. Several organizations from Korea, a country that is firmly on the metaverse path, are involved alongside oneM2M members from other countries.
Andrew Min-gyu Han of Hansung University and France-based Shane He from Nokia are co-leading the effort. Their aim is to identify and assess the feasibility of key use cases and requirements to enable metaverse services based on IoT. An important aspect of the work will deal with metaverse devices. Standardizing the definition of information models will create the foundations for easy data interoperability. Following best-practice standardization procedures, findings from the initial research will be published in a technical report (TR). This will feed into the next step to define technical standards (TS). As with other oneM2M publications, these are openly accessible and free to download, which increases the prospect for scalable and economically affordable solutions.
