From The Matrix to Neal Stephenson’s novel Snowcrash, Ready Player One to cyberspace (like William Gibson’s Neuromancer), our fiction is full of persistent, digital versions of reality. Dubbed a dozen different things with varying criteria, the latest flavor of scale is metaverse.
As a term, metaverse is increasingly hard to pin down, conjuring 3D games on bulky VR headsets, sometimes employed in vague marketing that promises a miraculous (or horrifying) future.
At the heart of these digital parallels of reality are AI-driven, virtual representations of real things. Something that’s already here, and increasingly showing a capacity to scale.
Virtual doppelgängers are here, whether it’s a manufacturing plant or a local coffee shop, the airport or meeting room. Doctors are already experimenting with analyzing potential treatment outcomes using virtual versions of real patients.
As these virtual replicas evolve and grow from a real-time data exchange, they become closer to digital reality solutions than traditional simulations, glimpsing that long-dreamt-of future.
This is the union of digital twin technology and artificial intelligence.
These rapidly emerging industry 4.0 solutions will not only transform business and healthcare, but may also pave the way for a more sustainable and interconnected world.