In October 2021, Facebook announced its intention to hire 10,000 new employees to build the metaverse. Following that, there were 2.62 million searches of the term “Metaverse” and mentions of the keyword rose by 135% in the fourth quarter of the year. This intention for new technology doesn’t just affect the tech space. It touches many industries and will have some effect on the lives of the billions of people who connect and engage on the internet daily.
An explainer
Everyone has a different idea of what the metaverse will be. Some think it’s like a video game, others feel it’s like walking through the internet or perhaps it’s an odd form of a video meeting where everyone shows up and interacts as avatars.
Honestly, it’s a little bit of all these. The Metaverse isn’t just one thing - it’s a convergence of different technologies. The Metaverse is made up of virtual worlds as well as augmented reality where the physical world has digital elements as part of our functioning and perception. The metaverse is also an evolution of our current internet and, if you consider the vast worlds of a game like Fortnite, the metaverse already exists in its infancy.
Different companies who have invested in building the Metaverse are approaching it from different perspectives. One thing they have not yet clearly defined is how we’ll interact with the metaverse. There is, however, a lot of promise and expectation for this virtual space that will be an expansion of our physical world merged with a digital world.
By creating a digital universe, we will be able to work, play and socialise digitally. Virtual reality headsets will make it possible to enjoy dinner parties, conferences or even client meetings in settings that feel more real with avatars that are a more nuanced reflection of the human personality. Best of all, in the metaverse, you should be able to take virtual assets like cars, real estate and even your digital identity and transfer them from one platform to another.
What the metaverse will also include is a digital economy. You’ll be able to enter virtual worlds, view products or enjoy experiences and pay for it online. With the help of augmented reality, you could walk past a restaurant, scan the logo and you’ll be able to view the menu with 3D images of the dishes plus reviews and comments from people you know. You could even look at a virtual sofa and get all the upholstery information with a 3D rendering of the digital fabric twin.
The power of digital twins in the Metaverse
To simply define a digital twin, it is a digital representation of a physical object, process or service. It is the result of a computer program using real-world data to create simulations that can predict how a product or process will perform.
"Digital twins essentially are a way to take stuff in the real world and represent them in the virtual world so we can give ourselves some superpowers." Rev Lebaredian, VP of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA.
NVIDIA Omniverse has already rolled out digital twins, including Twinbru’s digital fabric twins, in its shared virtual world in which users throughout the world may collaborate on varying software applications. This is one of the most exciting developments in both technology and design that underpins the importance of the digital twin to the Metaverse.
With a digital twin in the Metaverse, it can be created with live data but the digital twin will also continually be fed data from within its virtual world. This means a digital twin of a product will not only behave exactly as it would in the physical world, but it can also be tested and applied in different ways in the virtual world as the next level in digital prototyping.
Digital twins will certainly be the foundations upon which the metaverse will be built. They are sources of data that can be applied online for products or processes that don’t even exist in the real world yet. The added benefit is that digital twins can generate live streams of data that can be modelled to mirror the behaviour of their real-world counterparts.
All that data opens up infinite possibilities. Digital twins are helping to develop the metaverse, a digital counterpart of everything we see around us, and will be the source of all we experience in this virtual world whether it is property ownership or virtual gaming experiences to the AI technologies that will power it all.
Talking Twinbru’s language
As creators of digital twins of market-ready fabrics, Twinbru can see the incredible potential for solutions such as ours in the future of the metaverse. Our partnership with NVIDIA Omniverse is our contribution to the digital future of fabrics and the first step towards merging physical products with what will likely be virtual worlds.
Part of this journey is encouraging the industry and its associated fields to embrace digital innovations for their benefit. These include greater accessibility to a global market, greater efficiency, more innovation and, more importantly, improved sustainability.
There is much more to understand and explore and we continue the conversation in our blog entitled The metaverse and Twinbru’s digital fabric twins.