Industrial Metaverse: Experts Weigh In

During LiveWorx 2023, I hosted a panel to explore the current state of the industrial metaverse with leading experts on this technology. We heard fascinating insights from a client already using the industrial metaverse at scale, an expert analyst who has been following the growth of the metaverse for years, and one of the main drivers in developing this technology – our own CTO. 

• Helmut Draxler, Chief Digital and Information Officer of Burckhardt Compression Group
• Paul Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester
• Steve Dertien, Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at PTC

During this lively discussion, our panelists worked to define the industrial metaverse; detailed high-value use cases and their impact on manufacturing companies; and then explored the next steps for any companies looking to start their own industrial metaverse project.

For those who couldn’t attend – or couldn’t take notes fast enough to capture all the insights – here is a compressed Q&A summary of the panel.

Shiva Kashalkar: The first question is for Helmut. Can you please share some information about Burckhardt compression and how you came to use industrial metaverse technology?

Draxler: Like most companies, we compete for talent, which means we have a limited resource pool of service engineers with limited hours. So we started investigating how to improve the speed of our service. Then COVID hit, and it highlighted the importance of remote work. It was a game-changer. 

Before, we had tried to optimize the work of our field service engineers. After COVID, we shifted our focus toward the customers’ engineers and having them perform the job on our behalf. And that brought us to the idea of virtualization. 

We invested quite early in exploring metaverse technology for this application. With this technology, we quickly learned that we could speed up our reaction time, facilitate knowledge transfer between engineers, and nearly eliminate travel costs.

Watch a short video showing how Burckhardt is using industrial metaverse today: 

Paul, could you share Forrester's perspective on what the industrial metaverse is and what it is not?

Miller: The first thing about the industrial metaverse that's important – and that differentiates it from all those other metaverses you might have heard of – is that it’s a concrete connection between the physical and the digital. It only makes sense as a combination of physical and digital. 

And it's about more than just digitizing the physical world. It also allows you to see the invisible, like heat, air movement, and other things that are measurable but not visible to our eyes. 

Another important word here is context. The industrial metaverse can help you move beyond thinking about a single machine, and help you start thinking about its broader context. For example, think about how this machine is next to a leaking pipe. Or how this one is next to a forklift that is in the wrong place. Understanding that context is critical.

The final word is collaboration. The industrial metaverse differs from other metaverses because it focuses on collaboration over distance. That may mean two engineers standing in front of an asset, and one giving the other an augmented view of what's happening. Or it may be a remote engineer in Switzerland helping a customer on a boat in the middle of the North Sea. 

Steve, what is your take? What is PTC’s stance on the industrial metaverse? What is it best used for?

Dertien: As a company, one of our questions is, How can we give technology to people to help them respond with immense speed? Can we help you get multiple experts, teleport them in to diagnose what's going on with your machine, provide the bird’s eye view, and so on? In Helmut’s industry, this kind of speed is very important because 60 seconds of downtime is costly.

But the industrial metaverse is more than just imagery and the ability to spin things around in 3D. We also use computer vision to give you the ability to do analytics. 

I talk about this a lot. We use a lot of computer vision in baseball to help athletes improve by breaking down body mechanics. Why not use the metaverse to do that for industrial athletes who work on the floor every day? That’s hard work. So we are unlocking the technology that lets companies understand how to make that work more efficient, accurate, and ergonomically correct. 

There are certainly other hidden applications for our metaverse technology that will help companies find value streams. There are a lot of practical applications of the technology.

That leads to our next question. Helmut, can you please talk about the high-value applications you see for the industrial metaverse?

Draxler: As I said earlier, we’re using it for faster reaction time and reducing the need for our service engineers to travel. 

The other thing is that we can better prepare by investigating which parts and knowledge are needed for the job. If we’re sitting next to the machine and have the wrong part, it’s already too late – we’ll need to fly back to get it. Using the industrial metaverse, a service engineer can access the data they need to prepare properly.

In the end, these applications optimize the customer’s costs. They reduce downtime, limiting the money the customer loses while the machine isn’t running. In the past, while a service engineer spent a day traveling, the customer might lose a million dollars. And they still had to pay for the engineer’s time. So the cost savings can be significant.

The other thing about the industrial metaverse is safety. Liquid natural gas on a tanker does not want to be liquid. If the compressor is not running, it won’t stay liquid – then you have a situation that is quite stressful and risky. So responding faster with industrial metaverse technology makes everything safer. 

One more essential use is knowledge transfer. As people retire, they take the knowledge with them because it’s in their brains,  and that’s a big problem. The industrial metaverse helps us make that knowledge accessible to others. For example, imagine we need to fix a Shenyang compressor, but the engineer who knows how to do that is in China. During the pandemic, we learned that you can use the industrial metaverse to do a very simple knowledge transfer, so they can teach another engineer how to do it. 

The last high-value application is breaking company barriers. Today, we work with many primary suppliers and auxiliary suppliers, and we’re always losing information. With the industrial metaverse, we can put the necessary information from different companies in one place. Today, the service engineer can have all the data for all components in the machine in one view.

Paul, you've been researching this topic for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about the core applications for the industrial metaverse? 

Miller: I can think of three big ones. 

Remote support is crucial, as Helmut said. Training is next. You can use the industrial metaverse to help people gain knowledge of a new product or a new variant of a product. Without having to travel to a training center or travel to an asset to work with it.

The third high-value use is planning or rehearsal. You can use it to get the team together before doing complex tasks like assembling the wind turbine or dismantling the oil rig. You can have them work through the steps in the metaverse as a team, so they can understand all the processes before they do it for real.

When we look at remote services, in particular, you have to put a team of people on a helicopter, plane, ship, or even a fleet of land rovers to get to the site. They will take time to get there and then be there for eight hours. So you want to make that time count. The industrial metaverse can help your team be more efficient, effective, and safer during that short span of time. And it saves you money because it's less expensive to break stuff in the metaverse than to break that real compressor on that real ship.

Steve, can you share PTC’s thinking about the high-value uses of the industrial metaverse? How are we approaching it to help our customers?

Dertien: If you look at [PTC CEO] Jim [Heppelmann]'s keynote, he talked about our acquisition of ServiceMax. You’ll see that many companies are already deploying services over IoT. But at some point, a technician will still need to be dispatched to service something. Medical device companies are a great example of this.

So we like to think, Can we add to IoT service, and do even more of the service digitally? Can the industrial metaverse help our customers defer sending the technician in person? Can we have the customer be that technician for us? That's a fundamental value shift for our customers in terms of time and speed. 

We ultimately see this technology as a way for customers to command and control how they do service, engagement, and collaboration. It’s early yet, but we appreciate seeing that our customers are already narrowing in on very relevant use cases. 

When we talk about use cases, we talk a lot about field operations. Back to Steve: Your background is in manufacturing engineering. Do you see applications in this area? Or in analytics? 

Dertien: Absolutely. I have seen customers do some laborious things to understand how the labor force works on the floor. Like recording ten hours of video and then watching it all to do their analytics for optimizing line balancing and movement. With the industrial metaverse, we can do that in a matter of minutes.

We can do analytics on live video, so now you can do a work breakdown and say, Hey, is that a standard time for this process? With the Mercedes demo, our team showed how you can use the industrial metaverse to record how workers perform a wheel alignment process. Then, you can use analytics to get answers quickly, such as finding the standard time for that process.

You can assess not just the motion of people but each worker’s ergonomics. My ergonomics are very different from some of my other colleagues on the stage, so Shiva’s reach will be very different from mine. We can use this technology to analyze every worker’s ergonomics and use that data to make a healthier work environment.

And you can use the industrial metaverse for digital performance management. This technology for tracking people is now just a new type of IoT sensor, which we can use to get more context on what’s happening in the factory. It gives us a much bigger picture to work with. This is significant because factory spaces are enormous, and digital performance management is not just about one person on one task. It's about getting a comprehensive picture and accessing data from different parts of the organization.

Paul, can the industrial metaverse help us to make digital thread a reality?

Miller: People have talked about digital thread for decades, this idea that assets should flow from one step of the workflow to the next, to the next. And then ideally, the digital thread is a closed loop, so the assets supply the background for the next generation of the product. The reality? It’s not there yet. 

Part of that comes down to human nature. To make it work, your designer has to talk to the manufacturer, who has to talk to your service engineer, and so on. But field service engineers won’t talk to anybody – even though we need them to capture what they did, why they did it, and their rationale. The idea is that this data from the engineer feeds back to inform the design of the next-generation product.

Or the next time the field service engineer comes out on site. 

We're really, really bad at that kind of knowledge transfer right now. So finding new ways to capture what's going on in the field is critically important. The industrial metaverse can be part of that.

ServiceMax can be part of that because it helps us join up what humans do, what the IoT sensors tell us, and what machine learning or AI can infer. 

When you put those things together, the idea of digital thread gets really interesting.

Our audience is wondering how to get started. Let's take an example of one of these cases – remote assistance. What are some practical ways to get started with that? So maybe we can ask Steve first. What is PTC’s approach to getting companies started with the industrial metaverse?

Dertien: Right now, we are looking at partnering with customers for what we call lighthouse projects. Burckhardt, Vestas, and Mercedes are in that camp. If that interests you, reach out. 

We're also trying to make the technology accessible to everyone. It doesn’t require investing in complex, expensive, specialized computer vision. We’ve designed it to work with something as simple as an iPhone lidar sensor. We're trying to use as much commodity technology as we can. Some clients use drones to do a lot of the scanning indoors. Even if that's a bit higher-end, it’s still very accessible.

For the moment, though, I would say if you want to try it out, certainly get in touch with us. We'll figure out the use case together – particularly if you’re looking into remote service or remote analytics. 

Paul, do you have any advice about how to get started?

Miller: Focus on pragmatism. I talk to customers every week who are already doing these things at scale. Who use drones, robotic dogs, and photorealistic digital twins of entire factories and workspaces. These applications do exist, and they are amazing. But most of us aren't there yet.

So start by being practical. Start by being pragmatic. Start with a problem you want to address. The worst thing any of you could do is to walk out that door and say, I'm going to do an industrial metaverse project tomorrow. Do not do that. Focus on the problem, not the technology. 

To close out, I’ll ask our last question to Helmut. What do you think? What did Burckhardt learn about getting started with this technology?

Draxler: I fully agree that you should have a use case. You also have to change your paradigm. 

We started by striving for completeness, trying to put more and more data in our initial metaverse. But we have to do the opposite. We are learning to live with incomplete data at first. I like this approach because it is low effort, there are no prerequisites, and you can add more data in the future. 

When we take a machine out of the factory, it will include a metaverse. It could be empty except for machine-specific training, customer documentation, and machine documentation. When we start installing the machine, we can start collecting all the history of that metaverse immediately. And this metaverse will remain for the whole lifecycle of the machine, so we can collect all the data as needed over time and bring it into one spatial context. 

If you want to do the same in today's landscape, you have to start a job on a PDM system and search the data for the last 50 years. And don’t forget the ERP or CRM, the auction system, and the invoices. It becomes a mess in the end. Now, what we do with the industrial metaverse is very simple. And it works wonderfully. 

The industrial metaverse is a gamechanger for us.