Digital twins, unprecedented collaboration: What the metaverse means for developers

The the concept of the metaverse is not new – the term itself was coined a full 30 years ago – but public awareness of it has increased over the past year following a special announcement by the company formerly known as Facebook.

At first, the most talked about use cases were the usual suspects. Social media, gaming, movies, and other entertainment experiences were the focus of both the media and the public. However, given that the metaverse is still in its infancy, the possibilities are endless. With apps and software now at the heart of every business and organization, developers have a unique opportunity to shape what the metaverse will become with these newfound collaboration capabilities.

There are two ways to look at the metaverse: what it is now and what it will be in the future. If you think back to the early days of the Internet, when the term “cyberspace” was popular, no one really knew what cyberspace meant. Still, cyberspace conjured images of VR headsets and an immersive experience, even if it didn’t quite live up to what 1990s movies predicted.

There is no single metaverse today, although various platforms and companies would have you believe otherwise. Instead, many platforms can be considered metaverses (or “verses” for short) in their own right, including HyperVerse, Decentraland, The Sandbox, and even the mostly kid-oriented platform Roblox.

In an ideal future, the metaverse will be a globally connected network of universes connecting the physical and virtual worlds. It will combine the internet with various forms of immersive technology such as VR and AR, creating experiences unlike anything we’ve seen before.

This view, of course, has many implications for social and personal interactions. Imagine a live class from your California kitchen taught by a famous French pastry chef based in Paris. You can attend an up-and-coming singer perform at an intimate New York jazz club from your couch in Dallas. And the value doesn’t have to end with your free time. Remote software developers can collaborate with teammates and colleagues around the world in a more realistic and hands-on way than today’s Slack and Zoom interactions.

The key to cooperation in the Metaverse: Digital twins

You’ve probably heard the popular term “digital twin” as it relates to industry 4.0 and other IIoT strategies. In these cases, the term is used to describe a set of properties, identifiers, and activities (both real-time and historical) that can realistically represent a physical industrial asset digitally. These industrial digital twins are used for troubleshooting, modeling, what-if analysis, and more. is used for The most advanced digital twin systems they also begin to capture the processes and interactions of assets.

As metaverses evolve, we may very well see significant early adoption in industrial operations. Allowing people to interact with digital twins in the industrial metaverse presents many exciting opportunities to improve operations and safety, and to take chances that are unusually dangerous in manufacturing environments. Reloading the simulation is better than rebuilding the machine.

Bring these capabilities into everyday life and the possibilities grow exponentially. Early applications for digital twins in the consumer metaverse have provided very interesting concepts for job training and other occupational simulation, rehabilitation solutions for the injured, and low-risk training exercises for all types of human-to-human and human-to-machine. and machine-to-human interactions that would otherwise be impractical due to cost and/or risk.

There is even a possible future where our own actions and behavior are used to create a human digital twin – expanding the existing avatar concept into something more advanced. Maybe there will be a day when we can leave our digital twin in the metaverse to interact with others, provide services and even do digital jobs while we are asleep or offline or even after death. Thinking about the metaverse and human digital twins as a pathway to some measure of immortality is both scary and exciting. The implications here can never be fully understood.

What the Metaverse can (and should) mean for developers.

Whether you are a developer looking to enter the metaverse market or a game software or hardware developer looking to discover new applications in the metaverse, there are a few key points to keep in mind.

First, the metaverse is about the edge, the cloud, and everything in between. Understanding these concepts, the nature of distributed applications and how they overlap with other technology trends such as decentralized applications, ledgers, and hybrid time series platforms will pay off in the long run. There will be difficult “make or take” decisions everywhere in the application, and being pragmatic about these choices will make all the difference in a megatrend market.

Second, no vendor “owns” the metaverse, no matter what they think. Although several vendors have launched consumer-ready hardware and software platforms, or even undergone significant name changes, today’s vendor-owned metaverse looks more like America Online than the modern Internet. Product managers must go where users go, and engineers must build well-accepted frameworks for the real-world testing they require; but everyone should consider that the metaverse will ideally become a loosely coupled ecosystem of hardware, software, and infrastructure providers that provide consumers with commercial and open source technology a portal to the next evolution of the Internet.

Brian Gilmore is director of IoT and emerging technologies InfluxData