# The Industrial Metaverse The metaverse is making headlines these days. Facebook is [reportedly](https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/25/22745381/facebook-reality-labs-10-billion-metaverse) spending billions to build its own and expects to spend more for the next several years. But what is a metaverse, exactly? The metaverse is a general way of referring to immersive virtual worlds that are facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). More colloquially, a metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds, mostly focused on social connection. The last part of the previous paragraph is the key here. A big motivation behind the huge investments in developing the metaverse is about devising digitally crafted environments to extend—and according to some, improve—our social interactions. But one side of the metaverse we do not see so frequently covered in news is what we can call the industrial metaverse: a collective virtual environment where one can design, build, and verify complex systems. Organizations designing and building cyber-physical systems for aerospace, transportation, or similar (cars, aircraft, spacecraft, rockets, drones, UASs) need to create synthetic simulation environments throughout the product design life cycle: from high-level functional mockups at the early stages and all the way to hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) setups, where real parts of the products under design are connected to different simulators to gauge their performance, verify compliance with requirements and refine their development in an incremental capacity. Literally every single organization designing complex cyber-physical systems heavily relies on this simulation infrastructure. Aerospace companies, for instance, allocate huge hangars to keep what they call iron birds^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_bird_(aviation)], which are almost full-scale replicas of their aircraft, all connected to different simulation and stimulation infrastructures, including creating mechanical forces on their flight surfaces to simulate the aerodynamic pressures. Surprisingly, most—if not all—of these organizations grow these complex simulation capabilities from scratch, which takes time and it can be costly. What is more, two organizations creating cyber-physical systems that are meant to interoperate (for example, a satellite designer and a ground station provider) will most likely grow separate simulation environments that will never be able to mutually connect. It looks like a missed opportunity. It is easy to see that the next big step in aerospace, transportation, and cyber-physical systems engineering in general, is to create collaborative, networked simulated ‘worlds’ that would make it possible to field digital replicas of our designs and make them interoperate in a pure cybernetic domain. If this environment existed, it would allow different companies, big or small, to deploy their systems and make them interact with other systems in a physically accurate virtual manner. This would require not only a realistic simulation of the inner workings of said systems (and their subsystems and subcomponents) but also would require simulating the interaction with the surrounding virtual environment’s physical ‘laws’ coded in software to recreate all feedback effects, as well as the interaction with other systems present in this virtual ‘world’, including collisions, etc. The line between the industrial metaverse and a video game may look blurry but it’s crystal clear: in the industrial metaverse we are not playing, we are designing and fielding complex systems. For instance, an organization designing a [[Non-Terrestrial and Mobile Networks|non-terrestrial network]] could virtually test its service with potential customer devices made by other organizations and showcase its use case; this would allow everyone involved in this shared simulation to refine their concept of operations, service level agreements, and the like. These collaborative virtual ‘worlds’ would also offer private simulation instances, where actions would only affect one single organization or shared ones where actions could impact others. We could create controlled cyber ranges and test all kinds of scenarios and threat vectors to test the resiliency of our designs way before they are fielded in the real environment. The industrial metaverse could also include earlier life cycle stages such as Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV), where organizations would employ virtual reality to integrate subsystems provided by third-party suppliers, helping them to identify integration problems early in the process and boost the industrial design effort by reducing the current uncertainties when we are posed to design systems that cannot be fully [[The Quality of Quality#Testability and the Testing Environment|verified before we deploy them]].