ALUMNI NEWS
ENGINEERING (IN) THE METAVERSE: BEYOND THE HYPE? The new internet is coming. What until very recently was dismissed as a hype is gaining considerable momentum in business, industry, and everyday life. But what exactly is the metaverse? And how will it increase the efficiency of design, manufacturing, maintenance, marketing, and sales? On 25 October 2023, Alumni Engineers KU Leuven and EY Belgium organised a theme night on this subject at Group T Campus in Leuven.
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ver since sci-fi author Neil Stephenson named an alternate digital reality ‘metaverse’ in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’, the word has taken on a life of its own. It became hype when, in 2021, Facebook changed its name to ‘Meta’ and CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that 1 billion more people would move into the metaverse this decade and hundreds of millions of dollars would be generated in digital commerce. Meanwhile, excitement has given way to sobriety and the possibilities can be assessed more realistically. In his keynote, computer scientist and science communicator Jeroen Baert looked at the metaverse in the light of the digital transition. “Our world is becoming more digital; our customers are becoming more digital, and everything is increasingly taking place online. The metaverse is the merging of VR and AR technologies and online environments in a future phase of the internet. Users can make new con tacts there with their digital doppelganger but also work, meet, build, play games, shop and even do business.” Virtual 3D Jeroen was formal: ‘There is no such thing as THE metaverse. In practice, there is a now incalculable number of virtual 3D spaces in which the most diverse user
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groups are active. However diverse the metaverses may be, they have some characteristics in common. These allow us to give a form of definition. I characterise a metaverse as an autonomous, persistent virtual 3D world to which we can make sensory connection to let our avatar (that is the digital doppelganger) communicate and create with other sources. In essence, it is about interaction, or -even better- new forms of collaboration. In a business environment, these can lead to significant increases in productivity and reductions in costs.” According to Jeroen, the future of the metaverse is inextricably linked to technological advances. “Currently, the hardware to be active in the metaverse -think of VR glasses- is just good enough but not yet optimal. Many people still get nauseous when they put on such glasses. When really good products will come to the market soon, the metaverse will really break through.” Digital twins The combination of the real and virtual worlds is perhaps most advanced in the so-called Industrial Metaverse. Bart Demaegdt, Digitalization Technology Manager at Siemens Belgium, spoke about that. As a world leader in industrial automation, the company is also a pio-
© Filip Van Loock
neer in the use of digital twins in virtual 3D spaces. “Digital twins are at the heart of the Industrial Metaverse,” explained Bart. “As virtual representations of physical objects in the real world, they can greatly facilitate the planning and layout of factories, buildings and even entire city districts. By connecting the digital twins to their real-world equivalents and by leveraging their data, we can improve all operations of the entire life cycle.” For companies, a new world opens, literally and figuratively. The Industrial Metaverse is an ideal tool to help operators perform their tasks better. To assist company managers in their entry into the metaverse, Siemens developed the digital business platform Xcelerator. “Its solu-
