More than just imaginative industries, metaverse applications are just around the corner

Source: Community Marketing Institute

With the development reference of the Internet industry, the Metaverse industry has grown rapidly and deeply. Since 2021, multiple metaverse projects and platforms have emerged around the world, attracting the attention and participation of a large number of users and capital.

According to statistics from Yuanlishe, in 2022, the total investment and financing of Metaverse disclosed in China reached 13.6 billion yuan, an increase of 147% from 5.5 billion yuan in 2021; the total number of investment events was 221, an increase of 333% from 51 in 2021, which can be described as rapid growth.

You may be concerned about which tracks are being born in the Metaverse besides consumption and entertainment?

Recently, the Sutu Metaverse Research Institute released the "Research Report on China's Industrial Metaverse Trend (2023)", bringing the topic of the Industrial Metaverse into the public eye. The report believes that the industrial metaverse will become an inevitable trend in the development of the metaverse, which will give birth to a new generation of industrial infrastructure and drive the development of the real economy and the upgrading of social efficiency.

In fact, in the past year, many companies have made preliminary explorations of the commercialization of the Metaverse industry, and most of their attempts have focused on the field of marketing. Many marketing solutions based on technologies such as NFT, digital humans, and 3D scenes have gained good attention.

Although marketing is only the first step in the exploration and commercialization of new technologies, it also represents the acceptance of the market and consumers to the metaverse, which builds a promising future for the industrial metaverse.

1. Compared with the Industrial Internet, what problems can the Industrial Metaverse solve?

Before talking about the Industrial Metaverse, we have to mention the Industrial Internet.

The so-called "Industrial Internet" is a concept corresponding to the "Consumer Internet". The consumer Internet is oriented to individual consumers, and its goal is to satisfy personal consumption experience and help existing products and services to be better sold and circulated, while the industrial Internet mainly provides productive services for enterprises.

In 2022, there will be 88 investment and financing incidents involving enterprises in the industrial Internet field, with a total financing amount of 13.259 billion yuan, which is a downward trend compared with the investment and financing amount of 41.256 billion yuan and 149 investment and financing incidents in 2021.

The decline of the Industrial Internet implies a shift in the direction of the market, and the reason why the Industrial Metaverse is revolutionary is that it can identify and solve "specific problems" that the Industrial Internet cannot solve.

For example, in order to realize the visualization of operational process data, factories often need to use abstract mountain plots or similar two-dimensional graphical tables, but the industrial metaverse not only has rich data, but also allows workers to view, use and analyze data in a complete 3D environment. Its biggest advantage is information density and presentation.

This advantage of full application of data is most vividly reflected in the field of equipment maintenance. Because many industrial technologies are monopolized by foreign countries, many equipment failures often require foreign technical experts to inspect and repair on site. Aside from high maintenance costs, the time cost caused by downtime is even more immeasurable.

With the help of the Industrial Metaverse, remote experts can obtain actual operating procedures, scene-based spatial views, and more effective information within minutes. It is easier for on-site workers and experts to find common ground and communicate effectively.

It can be said that the Industrial Metaverse and the Industrial Internet share similar underlying technologies, both of which are supported by big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The goal is to use Internet technology to connect and reconstruct traditional industries.

However, compared with the Industrial Internet, the Industrial Metaverse carries a larger amount of information and displays more comprehensive information, so it can solve more specific problems.

Science and technology author Meng Yonghui believes that the Metaverse is even included in the category of the industrial Internet. "On the surface, Metaverse is an existence dominated by transforming the lifestyle of the C-end, while the Industrial Internet is an existence dominated by the transformation of the production method of the B-end. In fact, they are just different forms of the same development model at different stages of development."

**Second, the metaverse has a high starting point for technology and greater advantages in industrial development! **

At present, the practice of my country's industrial Internet is mostly focused on "transaction digitization", shortening the circulation link through digital intelligent procurement + settlement + warehouse distribution, reducing information matching costs and transaction costs, which is also the best entry point to realize the digitization of all elements of the industrial chain.

The purpose of the Industrial Metaverse and the Industrial Internet is to promote the integration of the digital world and the physical world. However, compared to the slow growth of the Internet relying on the development of infrastructure, the Industrial Metaverse stood at the commanding heights in the early days of its birth.

The "2022 Metaverse Report" issued by Tsinghua University's Metaverse Laboratory believes that Metaverse, as a collection of emerging industrial technologies, integrates a number of high-tech industrial chains.

Taking its typical underlying technologies such as "spatial intelligence", "spatial computing" and "spatial intelligence" as examples, it can not only help industrial enterprises in R&D, production, sales, supply chain, circulation, service and other links, form a new industrial system, achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement, efficient collaboration, energy saving and emission reduction, but also help traditional industries complete the transformation.

It can be said that due to the high starting point of the Metaverse, this industry can directly skip "large-scale consumer applications" and directly enter the vertical industry field. Sutu Metaverse Research Institute also believes that "in the metaverse era, technological innovation is no longer a single-point breakthrough, but begins to seek systematic development."

At present, the industrial chain layout of the industrial metaverse has been extremely extensive. According to public information, the metaverse has been widely used in many fields, which can be divided into the following five points:

One is the Industrial Metaverse

Focus on the integration of the ubiquitous perception of the manufacturing production system and the cyber-physical system, build a cloud-based business application platform, build a digital twin factory, and comprehensively simulate the entire production chain links such as R&D design, production and manufacturing, operation and maintenance management, etc., to help product life cycle management and process optimization, form industry solutions, and reduce production costs and increase efficiency.

Second is the Education Metaverse

Cultivate differentiated terminals, introduce virtual digital human teachers, develop various digital twin campuses (Shanghai), and explore integrated applications and solutions such as multi-point collaborative teaching and remote interactive teaching around teaching training, digital classrooms, air classrooms, quality education and other scenarios.

The third is the medical universe

Encourage meta-diagnosis and support clinical research of XR technology in the fields of visual diagnosis and treatment, myopia prevention and treatment; encourage breakthroughs in the fields of new drug development and pathology research combined with microscopic 3D imaging, molecular simulation and other technologies. For example, build a medical three-dimensional auxiliary diagnosis and treatment platform, optimize preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation and other solutions; develop medical virtual guides, promote medical application development and other safeguards.

Fourth is the Cultural Travel Metaverse

Promote scenic spots, museums, cultural centers, theme parks, etc., create an immersive digital twin that combines offline and online, encourage the development of unique Metaverse IP based on historical culture, mountains and rivers, urban landmarks, etc., give birth to new business forms and models such as cloud games and cloud studios, cultivate new ecology, expand the scale of digital collections, and create virtual reality solutions.

The fifth is the business metaverse

Enterprises build digital cloud exhibition halls to promote multi-person interaction on the same screen, online communities, and real-time interaction of voice and motion. Encourage the creation of virtual full-scene navigation applications such as indoor navigation, commercial shopping guides, and parking and car search. Create a highland for content creation in China Metaverse, create demonstrations of landmark and characteristic scenes, and form scenario-based application solutions.

On December 17, 2021, at the Netease Future Conference, Tao Dacheng, President of JD Discovery Research Institute and academician of the Australian Academy of Sciences, gave a keynote speech on "Building a New World of Digital and Physical Integration".

Today, in just two years, the Industrial Metaverse has achieved remarkable results. It is conceivable that in this brand-new industrial digital intelligence revolution, the Industrial Metaverse will also extend the depth and breadth of the implementation of pan-artificial intelligence technology in the industry, accelerate the deep integration of technology and industry, and stimulate the vitality and creativity of the real economy.