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Metaverse, a concept that became popular in 2021, has almost disappeared from the mainstream vision in the past year. After the bubble disappeared, if we turn our attention to traditional manufacturing, we will see that the metaverse in the industrial field has emerged.

"About two years ago, the concept of the metaverse was very popular, and many companies were hyping this concept. The metaverse and entertainment are strongly related. Many metaverses are in a form close to games, or have some scenic spots or concerts added to them, and are moving in this direction." Zhang Liming, head of Unity China's industrial business, told Caixin that he feels this trend is changing in the past year.

"Most companies now no longer mention this concept, and everyone has found that this direction has not brought improvements to our actual productivity or a better experience for end users." But at the same time, Unity has talked to many industrial customers in the past year, and Zhang Liming found that one of the things they were doing was trying to simulate and restore all the capabilities of the real production line in the three-dimensional metaverse, or what they call a digital twin factory.

In some large-scale manufacturing scenarios, what has been implemented now is to build a "factory in the metaverse" before building a real factory. That is to say, build a factory in a three-dimensional environment, simulate the operation of each equipment in the production line, as well as the interaction between equipment and factory buildings, the interaction between people and equipment, and the transmission interaction between materials and equipment.

"This can avoid the long cycle of discovering problems and making adjustments during the production line construction process." Zhang Liming said that one of their clients is a leading new energy vehicle manufacturer, which used this three-dimensional method to build a virtual factory, saving several months in the construction of the entire factory production line. In terms of implementation costs, the digital twin system costs about a million yuan, but it can save tens of millions in construction costs.

Unity China CEO Zhang Junbo also felt that from 2022 to now, we have experienced the bubble of the Metaverse. Under the previous assumptions, everyone may have set some unrealistic goals, and many things did not come true in the end. But now, when it comes to the Metaverse and digital twins, everyone has gotten rid of just looking at them and is considering using them. "When operating a factory or a building, the equipment and CAD data inside come from a variety of manufacturers. What Unity does is to string these data together in a visible place." This is what everyone is steadily investing real money in.

The most important value of the industrial metaverse is to create a comprehensive digital twin of the complex systems of modern industry, making the entire industry fully digital and intelligent. In addition to the design stage, the factory can be virtually built in advance, and the simulated digital twin can be applied to all aspects of construction and operation and maintenance. Zhang Liming believes that the above direction is the direction that can truly improve the productivity of the manufacturing industry, and this may become a major trend in the next one or two years.

However, the current digital twin system costs millions of dollars, and can only be afforded by large manufacturing companies. For these companies, the overall ROI (return on investment) is positive, but this may not be the case for some small and medium-sized factories.

In the long run, if these capabilities are turned into standardized software products, it is possible to reduce costs and benefit small and medium-sized manufacturing companies. "Because we are in the construction stage now, there is a lot of investment in the construction process, both in terms of manpower and capital. When all the capabilities are mature and turned into standardized software products, they can be given to small and medium-sized customers at a very low price," said Zhang Liming.

Behind the successful development of the industrial metaverse, the support of computing power in factory scenarios and the promotion of policies are both contributing factors.

The full-scene simulation of the factory involves some details and equipment in the factory. Zhang Liming introduced that this is related to another difficulty, that is, the complexity of the real world is far more complex than the common three-dimensional scenes of the metaverse in the past. "Some industrial customers have sent us some test factory scenes. After we import them into Unity, there are at least millions of 3D objects. If a complete factory is to be simulated, there may be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of 3D objects. This puts very high demands on our engine's ability to process massive data and the computing power of hardware chips."

In fact, the reason why digital twins only performed superficial functions in the past was that they encountered these basic difficulties and did not make breakthroughs, but now the hardware capabilities have been improved. Zhang Liming introduced that some technical solutions can now be used to solve this basic support problem, including modifying the engine so that the engine can process more data in parallel. Another way is to make better use of existing hardware capabilities, so that the engine can use 200 CPU cores in parallel at the same time, or use 10 or 20 graphics cards at the same time to simulate a more complex real-world scene.

Previously, when the concept of the metaverse was popular, one of the main points of criticism was that the current computing power was not enough to support the reproduction of the complex real world. However, Zhang Liming said that the previous metaverse was different from the current industrial scenario. "The metaverse is more about using consumer-grade hardware. For example, if you want to run a metaverse on a mobile phone, or on a computer, the computing power is very limited. It is unlikely to run 100 million objects on a mobile phone."

However, the good thing about the metaverse of industrial scenarios is that this type of scenario can use some high-performance computing server clusters. The computing power of this hardware may be hundreds of times higher than that of mobile phones. Such hardware is capable of performing extremely complex industrial scenario simulations.

In addition to the adaptation of technology and scenarios, policy promotion is also a great help. In August 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and five other departments jointly issued the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Innovation and Development of the Metaverse Industry (2023-2025)". This plan is the first special metaverse document officially issued by a national ministry. It defines the concept of the metaverse and clearly proposes to build an industrial metaverse and empower the manufacturing industry as the main goals, create a number of typical industrial metaverse applications, and form a number of benchmark production lines, factories, and parks.

Zhang Liming said that many car manufacturers and traditional manufacturing industries have also received guidance and calls from the country. They will discuss the formulation of standards for the next generation of digital twins. How can digital twins truly improve productivity? At present, everyone is working in this direction.

The "2024 China Industrial Metaverse Industry Special Research Report" released by Zhiyan Consulting shows that with policy support in recent years, my country's industrial metaverse has developed rapidly. In 2023, the market size of my country's industrial metaverse was 17.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18%. It is mainly distributed in the eastern regions with more complete infrastructure such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Beijing, Fujian, etc., while the western region has developed relatively slowly.