Using the Metaverse for Real Work Requires Real Data
We’ve already got the BIM models; can someone bring them into the metaverse?
WRITTEN BY Jonathan Girroir
The metaverse is much on people’s minds these days — along with the uncertainty about what exactly the metaverse is.
While the definition is a bit nebulous at this stage, we can think of the metaverse as a digital world or digital context that people are able to experience in any number of ways — whether that’s through an AR/VR headset or through a 2D screen on a desktop, tablet or phone.
Aspects of the metaverse have been around for quite some time. Second Life was a phenomenon when it launched nearly two decades ago and provided a way for multiple people to interact together in a digital world via their computers. Popular gaming environments like Roblox and Fortnite serve a similar function today, providing a digital world for throngs of people to explore that is underpinned by powerful 3D engines.
If you’ve used the AR feature on your phone to view your potential furniture purchase in your living room or played rounds of Pokémon Go, you’ve dipped your toes in the metaverse without realizing it. The same goes for anyone who’s strapped on a VR headset to explore an exotic digital world populated with dinosaurs or other creatures.
These forays into the metaverse aren’t limited to consumers. The engineering world has taken some “meta steps” in recent years. Nearly a decade ago, some companies started to offer “CAVES” (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), where you could project an entire construction site on the walls of a large room, enabling users to navigate the site. Today that can be accomplished with VR headsets.
Simply put, the metaverse is all around us and has been for some time. This begs the question: as the metaverse becomes more and more of a mainstream concept and has been given a name, how do we populate it to create the most realistic digital world for people to interact with and do serious work, like engineering and construction?
The Data Exists
Populating the metaverse doesn’t have to be a challenge. The fact is, we have already designed the world that we exist in — our cities, our factories, our buildings, our transportation systems, the objects that sit on our desks and in our homes.
The manufacturing and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries have been creating digital worlds for a long time via digital prototypes and digital models of things that eventually get built in the real world. For example, when a construction company delivers a major new skyscraper, they don’t just hand over the keys of the building to the new owner. They provide a series of building information modeling (BIM) plans and digital assets that enable the owners to maintain that building and easily make alterations or repairs.
Industry 4.0 and the concept of the digital twin has added an additional layer of reality to the digital world by drawing upon real-time data from connected sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices to follow a product or building through its life cycle, updating the digital models accordingly.
Meanwhile, big tech players like Google and Apple are not just mapping the world; they are capturing detailed information about the built assets in that world. Click on a mapping app these days and you’ll not only get your current location but also accurate 3D representations of the buildings in your vicinity. Initiatives around smart cities take a similar tack, modeling all aspects of a city — from the streets, to the sewers, to the skyscrapers — in all their complexity.
In other words, the data needed to populate the metaverse and create a compelling digital world largely exists. All we need to do now is bring it all together.
Tapping into the Metaverse
For engineering software vendors hoping to create solutions that tap into the metaverse, this means, first and foremost, that they will need to have the ability to import and export CAD data in multiple different formats. They will also need to be able to support new data formats like glTF that add a higher level of fidelity to objects by including not just surfaces, geometry and colors but also roughness, shine and environmental effects.
Once that type of support is in place, real engineering workflows become possible. In a metaverse populated by a variety of rich CAD data models, benefits can be achieved at nearly every stage of an engineering project, from initial planning and collaboration, to manufacturing or construction through ongoing maintenance and life cycle management.
Let’s say that an AEC firm is doing an overhaul of an airport and wants to bring all the relevant data together in the metaverse so that its project planners and engineers — regardless of where they’re physically located in the world — can get a better understanding of the project in its totality.
But if the airplanes were designed in one CAD format, the hangars in another, the people movers in yet another, there has to be some way to bring all that data together to make a fully functional and representational model of the entire airport that can be navigated via headsets or screens. Only then can you understand the airport as a whole.
During construction, having all that data in one place and easily accessible in the metaverse can provide powerful digital context to the job site — not just around what’s already there but also around what will be there.
For instance, if an engineering change order requires moving a pylon 6 inches to the left, you want to know what clashes could result from this change. The ability to overlay digital information onto a working site provides an instant grasp of the situation. A stack of blueprints could never do that. The metaverse has just saved an immense amount of time and money.
Now, picture the ongoing operation phase of the airport. The people movers break down and the onsite technician is unfamiliar with the inner workings of this machinery.
By using a tablet or headset, however, the technician can overlay the detailed 3D design of the conveyor on the physical conveyor on-site. Is everything as it should be? Perhaps a bolt has worked itself loose and shows up as out of place compared to the assembly model. Notes will appear on the display that indicate “Check the fuses here,” eliminating the ambiguity or guesswork that comes from trying to interpret a repair manual. The technician could even get remote assistance from a more experienced colleague across the world, who can see what the technician is seeing and coach them through the repair by highlighting or redlining the areas that need attention.
Hype No Longer
The above scenario shows how equipment can be repaired and maintained — without the time, expense and labor of flying technicians to the site. Is that not making effective use of human resources?
There is a whole spectrum of benefits to the metaverse, enough to call it the promised land — if it can be populated with enough realistic data.
Real work requires real data. If the metaverse is to live up to its hype and take off in a way that enables serious work — not just games — it needs to offer people a realistic interactive 3D digital environment.
Fortunately, many of the parts of the metaverse already exist. They have been modeled in 3D. They are waiting to be used in the metaverse. If we can bring them into the metaverse, the metaverse will be useful in engineering workflows. Only then will the metaverse go where it is on the Hype Cycle [i] to reach the “plateau of productivity,” or in other words, an essential technology for getting work done.
This article was originally published in Engineering.com, https://www.engineering.com/story/using-the-metaverse-for-real-work-requires-real-data
