Comment: The metaverse is an infinite database of digital twins

The Metaverse is the future. It brings the real and virtual worlds together. For engineers, this opens unimagined possibilities in terms of driving innovative ideas forward. Here's a thought experiment: Imagine Aristotle, Issac Newton or Marie Curie had put on XR glasses and been able to access the ideas and knowledge of their contemporaries without restriction and work on them together. Further, imagine how many more names would be added to the list of great inventors and scientists if access to data had been subject to less exclusivity. 

The global challenges we face require the concerted cooperation of the entire world community. The Metaverse greatly facilitates collaboration among engineers far beyond national boundaries. Young talent as well as seasoned professionals from anywhere in the world alike have the ability to access and collaborate on the potentially infinite database of digital twins. Citi has predicted that five billion people could be using the metaverse by the end of the decade. It all sounds very visionary, doesn't it? Here's a slightly more pragmatic take on the Metaverse.

New age of engineering or rather prototyping 2.0?

Engineers used to develop innovative products using hardware prototypes whose properties and behaviour they observed in the real world. The associated cycle of design, build, test and adaptation was time-consuming and costly. More recently, engineers have been using virtual prototyping, in which they design the product on the computer using CAD tools and use CAE simulations to simulate the product's behaviour under various operating conditions. The cycle under these conditions is design, analyse, adapt, build. How does this process change now with the metaverse?

Until now, the result of a simulation was viewed on a 2D computer screen. With augmented reality and virtual reality, an engineer can visualise and experience the product in 3D. In this way, Metaverse brings together the real and virtual worlds with AR/VR and CAD and CAE simulations in the cloud. This gives engineers the opportunity to spin new ideas much further and at the same time implement them in a very concrete and vivid way. Entire systems and systems of systems can be simulated. Virtual worlds can therefore be created for testing and optimising new products that are precisely tailored to them.

A good example would be the testing of autonomous vehicles, where not only the vehicle itself must be simulated, but also how it behaves in interaction with other vehicles, on different roads, in different countries (with different road signs and markings), in different weather conditions, and so on. Merging all this heterogeneous information from many different sources can only be achieved with the Metaverse as the largest unified database for digital twins. 

New forms of collaboration

In the past, a technical design was created by an engineer using a CAD tool on a single workstation. Once the design was completed, it was submitted to an analyst who used CAE simulation on another workstation. Any feedback between the analyst and the engineer was done sequentially after the changes were completed. With the Metaverse, AR/VR and CAD and CAE in the cloud, multiple engineers can design AND analyse AND make iterative improvements as if they were working on the real product in the physical world (with the difference that it's in the virtual world and they can take advantage of its many benefits). 

They can also run what-if scenarios that are not possible in the real world, such as extremely high temperatures or accelerations. Because the Metaverse can merge data from multiple sources, the virtual test environment for the product becomes much richer and more accurate. Going back to the autonomous vehicle testing example: If you only have the vehicle, you can test the system itself, but you can't test how it performs in real-world conditions. You need other vehicles, road networks, weather conditions, and even 5G coverage to make the simulation meaningful. All of this can be implemented in Metaverse with the highest accuracy and efficiency.

We are only at the beginning

Currently, we are in a very early phase of the metaverse, in which primarily the tech giants are driving the field. This will change rapidly in the coming years. The disruptive quality of the metaverse is precisely its decentralised nature and the potentially infinite options it offers for new applications. Concrete participation in innovation has historically only been possible for a small elite. The Metaverse revolutionises access and collaboration on innovative ideas from the ground up. Individual geniuses and teams have always excelled in the past, and yet it is now time to bring together the myriad of potentials and not only think big, but also put it into action.

Dr. Prith Baneerje, CTO at Ansys