May 2023

Post Author – Rajeev Sharma, Senior Architect and Competency Lead, Prolifics

The concept of the industrial metaverse is becoming increasingly popular in technology and innovation. The “metaverse” refers to a virtual world where people can interact with digital objects and each other in a fully immersive environment. While this concept was initially tied to gaming and entertainment, today it is powering new possibilities in industrial automation trends, metaverse manufacturing, and Industry 4.0.

Did you know that by 2030, the global metaverse market is expected to surpass $900 billion, with a significant portion linked to industries outside of gaming? The industrial metaverse is one of the most promising applications of this shift. Unlike its entertainment-focused cousin, the industrial metaverse integrates virtual environments, digital twin technology, and immersive simulations into real-world industrial operations.

In industrial settings, automation relies on technology and computer systems to control and monitor processes with greater accuracy and safety. The industrial metaverse enhances this by enabling real-time collaboration, monitoring, and simulation—without requiring a physical presence. As industries explore metaverse applications in manufacturing, they gain opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and accelerate decision-making.

Let’s highlight some value adds and advantages of utilizing the metaverse in industrial automation:

1. Accessibility Without Physical Presence

One of the most impactful industrial metaverse use cases is remote accessibility. Workers can monitor and control processes from anywhere in the world—an invaluable benefit in hazardous environments like chemical or nuclear plants. By integrating digital twin technology, factories can visualize operations virtually, ensuring safer and smarter control without the risks of exposure.

2. Effective Training and Collaboration with VR & AR

The role of AR and VR in industrial automation is critical for employee training and team collaboration. Instead of relying on physical equipment, companies can train staff using immersive simulations, cutting costs and risks. Real-world scenarios—such as equipment breakdowns or emergencies—can be replicated in a safe virtual environment. This improves response times, collective decision-making, and long-term workforce readiness.

3. Better Analysis and Insights with Digital Twins

The industrial metaverse makes it possible to visualize complex data and processes in 3D environments. Using digital twin technology, organizations can mirror production lines virtually and monitor systems in real time. This provides deeper insights into process inefficiencies and enables quick corrective actions. By learning how to implement digital twin in manufacturing, companies can bridge the gap between physical assets and digital monitoring—leading to faster innovation and predictive maintenance.

4. Driving Agility with a Fail-Fast Strategy

Manufacturers often hesitate to adopt new technologies due to costs and risks. However, the industrial metaverse enables safe experimentation through synthetic data, AI, AR, and VR. This supports a “fail-fast” strategy, allowing manufacturers to test different scenarios and evaluate outcomes before scaling them. For industries focused on agility, this highlights how industrial metaverse improves efficiency and accelerates innovation.

5. Reliable Smoke Tests Before Go-Live

Another major advantage lies in simulation. With digital twin technology, manufacturers can validate both external functionality and internal core features in near real-time before deployment. This acts as a reliable smoke test, reducing downtime, costs, and unexpected failures. For companies seeking the benefits of metaverse for factory automation, this ensures higher confidence before large-scale rollouts.

6. Connected Worker Experiences and Smart Factories

At Prolifics, one of our offerings is the “Industrial Metaverse & Connected Worker Experiences.” This enhances the work environment for industrial workers using wearables, smart devices, and IoT-enabled tools. When combined with AI, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP), these tools empower workers to receive real-time insights, predictions, and step-by-step guidance. Such innovations define the future of industrial operations with metaverse by bridging human expertise with intelligent systems.

Challenges of Industrial Metaverse Adoption

Despite its potential, industries face barriers to adoption. High infrastructure costs, lack of standardization, data privacy concerns, and workforce training gaps are among the key challenges of industrial metaverse adoption. Overcoming these hurdles will require careful planning, stakeholder alignment, and incremental deployment strategies.

Conclusion

The industrial metaverse is not just a futuristic concept—it is already shaping the present and future of metaverse manufacturing and industry 4.0. With its ability to enhance safety, boost efficiency, and foster innovation through digital twin technology and immersive collaboration, the possibilities are limitless. While challenges exist, the benefits of metaverse for factory automation are too significant to ignore. As industries embrace these innovations, the future of industrial operations with metaverse will unlock new levels of productivity, agility, and resilience.

Blog by Swati Dora, Prolifics Associate Client Success Leader

After a hectic day at work, I wanted to watch “Tom and Jerry” reruns. I searched YouTube but couldn’t find the episodes that I liked. I remembered that I have a few episodes saved in my laptop. But I wanted to see it on a bigger screen after working all day on a laptop. So, I connected my laptop to the TV using a cable. I laughed my heart out and had a perfect break.

Let’s think back on what we do regularly, and how we need data and devices connected. This is “integration.” Integration solves the problem of connecting systems together so that you don’t have to store and access the same data in various locations. As a result, you can have numerous options on the interconnected systems.

Change is a constant. As and when your business needs change, you will need to plug in data from third parties or different sources to achieve a wider range of tasks in your single application. Integration is essential for virtually all enterprises to thrive. The range of integrations varies by the purpose (content, analytics) and the integration solution can solve a simple need or tie off varied complex components of the business. To connect back to the daily life analogy, without integration I couldn’t have connected my laptop to the TV to watch my favorite cartoon.

The government has announced $13 billion in financial opportunities for expansion and modernization of the nation’s electric grid – “Building a Better Grid Initiative.” Coming back to the need for integration in energy and utility (E&U) modernization, we need it for accessing data related to customers, metering, billing, weather, geospatial, outages, grid, legacy applications, drive analytics, dashboard and so on. 

Some emerging E&U trends:

Integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DER) – The majority of the E&U players have pledged to a carbon-free footprint by 2050 to reduce the effects of climate change. The government is also paying subsidies to install solar panels as a renewable source of energy. To improve service reliability and reduce hazards, E&U is also supporting remote grids. While all these solve the core problem of generating electricity efficiently, we would still need to fulfill several other customer requirements such as tracking their energy usage, connecting these DERs to the main grid and existing applications.

Real-time energy usage – Both consumers and producers can benefit tremendously from insightful near real-time usage data. With distributed energy resources and ADMS, producers can use the data to predict usage patterns and generate appropriately. Consumers can choose to switch appliances on and off, using them at low demand times to enjoy lower rates. Batteries can be used for storing power and used as back-up during adversities.

Demand forecasting – With advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and electric vehicles (EVs) on the rise, E&U companies will have huge amounts of data coming in. Appropriate artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) models can help these companies build efficient operational engines that powers their integration, analytics and monitoring dashboards. They can use this data, in addition with weather data, to forecast unplanned outages, sudden surges on the grid during peak hours, and thereby plan generation better.

Industrial metaverse – Asset, system and customer engagement can see maximum reaped benefits by adopting building blocks of the metaverse, such as digital twins, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Think about the benefits the industry can reap while predicting the asset maintenance or planned generation capacities by intertwining the real-time data from sensors on assets with digital twins. It’s the near future!

What integration products are available?

Depending on your intent and your information type, there are various product suites available in the market to choose from. Some of the product suites that I have implemented in my experience are:

• IBM MQ, ACE: Simplicity, speed, and extensive connectors are a few of its great values. The out-of-the-box (OOB) specs would cover most needs. It is one of the best tools for using an enterprise service bus (ESB) in a large-scale company.
• Salesforce MuleSoft Anypoint Platform: It has one of the best “marketecture.” It is robust, configurable and scalable.
• Informatica IICS: It helped to communicate and integrate different applications and databases very seamlessly. It fit really well as an orchestration platform.
• A few other suites that I have come across are Seeburger BIS, TIBCO Cloud Integration, Oracle Service Bus. Each of these products comes with its own flavors of features and pricing.

How would E&U companies benefit from modernizing integration?

• Drive innovation: Integration helps stitch data across your enterprise and gives you valuable insight. A single stage view will drive a lot of use cases for forecasting maintenance of assets, predicting generation, and aiding a customer-centric journey.
• Fast to market: In today’s generation, a company thrives when it’s able to adapt to rapidly changing patterns of consumer behaviors. Integration helps in building backbone for the plug and play of the required information.
• Improve key performance indicators (KPIs): Whether it’s the “Customer Average Interruption Duration Index,” “System Average Interruption Duration Index,” or “Asset Utilization,” each of these indices plays a very important role in the health of the E&U industry. Integration plays a core role in not only calculating these indices but also provides a segue to use the data – with AI/ML – to break the barriers associated with energy generation, transmission and distribution.

Let’s unlock the potential of all your applications by integrating them and building a strong product by bringing in the best from each. My favorite quotes from Steve Jobs sums it all perfectly: “Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative.”

Read Swati’s other blogs:

A True – and All Too Common – MDM Horror Story

Modernizing Energy and Utility (E&U) Assets