What is the industrial metaverse?

While industries like mining, and oil and gas might struggle to find immediate value from the classical metaverse via avatars and NFTs, the industrial metaverse is transforming work on the front lines.

According to Hendrik Witt, chief product officer at remote connectivity and augmented reality software TeamViewer, approximately 80 percent of the global workforce is made up of frontline workers, working in the field rather than in the home or office.

“At the end of the day, you as industrial leaders are interested in work tools. You're not necessarily interested in gadgets, the latest and greatest stuff to play around with, but it's all about tangible business benefits,” said Witt.

He described the industrial metaverse as a blend between digital and real life.

“You are staying in the reality, but digital information, digital content gets really blended into your reality. It is enriching your experiences. It can help you eventually do better. The perfect blend and combination of a digital world still being in the physical world and the reality, that is what is behind the industrial metaverse.”

Witt insisted that tools such as augmented and virtual reality can provide significant value to front-line workers, such as by using software that transforms a hardware tool into a hands-free tool.

“The way you do work today is probably very efficient, thought through, all of that. But with these new capabilities, you can redefine work processes you can reshape them and make them better, make them, on the one hand, for example, more ergonomic for the people using them,“ he said.

“But, you can also reduce error rates, you can improve process performance, you can come up with a way more flexible solution for all your business processes.”

Coca-Cola is one TeamViewer customer leveraging the smart glasses, Frontline tool to improve order fulfilment in their warehouses, said Witt.

Employees don the glasses and can scan the warehouse as they work, in order to pick the right product, at the right time, and put it in the right place.

“What [Coca-Cola] were able to do is really to significantly drive down error rates in terms of wrong pick items,” he said.

They also leveraged the technology with the purposes of improving employee experience, said Witt.

“In fact, [Coca-Cola employees] were saying ‘Okay with that technology, I don't want to go back to the old,’ because it was making the entire process for them so much more ergonomic and seamless.”

Velvet-Belle travelled to Perth as a guest of TeamViewer for a customer, partner and media presentation.