Beyond the fantasy world of video games lies an industrial metaverse that looks and behaves like the real world. In this metaverse, we can see and understand how things are connected: cruise ships and air pollution, solar farm output and city energy usage, port schedules and rail speeds. An industrial metaverse is made to work in, and is driven by, data gathered from the real world using traffic, weather, or industrial sensors. This accurate reflection of the world in real time, even as that world is in perpetual motion, has untold value in an industrial setting. The industrial metaverse promises to do for data what wikipedia has done for knowledge.
But what is a metaverse at all? Generally speaking, a metaverse is a virtual world where you and I can meet, talk, play, work and explore. In most cases, we’ve experienced this in the form of a fictional game. We’re familiar with Fortnite, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and Animal Crossing, all examples of the so-called “entertainment metaverse,” which are well-developed at this point as world-building games where a “player” has many activities to pursue within the landscape of play. As the focus is on place rather than time, these metaverses allow for open-ended engagement that is not tied to a fixed narrative.
Now imagine Minecraft, but mimicking the real world using data. This is the industrial metaverse, which looks and behaves like the real world. We can think of it as a nonfiction version of the entertainment metaverse, in that both offer vast worlds where you can do many types of activities. An immediately resonant application is offering virtual training simulations in the metaverse where a team can work through the mechanics of a wind turbine, or the logistics of a factory floor in real time, in 3-D. Activities done in the industrial metaverse are driven by the same aim – to maximize efficiency and productivity in the real world by engaging with real-world data in a virtual setting.
While this work is well underway in many industrial sectors, the problem is that everyone is building their own industrial data frameworks in silos. From a data processing perspective, this is like each company inventing its own wheel without a way to connect that wheel, or cog, to the rest of an increasingly globalized industrial machine. SEKAI is building the solution – a common public platform to map this previously siloed data so that it can be made interoperable – so that users can see how the cogs fit and work together. This is what we call the SEKAI Industrial Metaverse. Our metaverse is a mirror of the world, with the ability to bring in data and build models and watch them respond in real time. Ships, trains, and planes can look and move as they would on earth. If you can build it out there, you can put it in the SEKAI Industrial Metaverse. The possibilities are endless.
The SEKAI Industrial Metaverse enables people and businesses to use data to run their operations more efficiently through open collaboration. By crowdsourcing the world, SEKAI makes it cost-effective and thus profitable to build the metaverse, revolutionizing the way we treat data, moving it from corporate silos to an interconnected landscape. From individuals to universities, small companies to large corporations, town councils to national governments, the SEKAI Industrial Metaverse creates the virtual space to work together to solve real life challenges.
