Metaverse is a term coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, an exponent of cyberpunk, who utilized it in his book "Snow Crash".
Nowadays, the word metaverse indicates a digital universe shared via the Internet; it's the result of multiple technological elements, including video, virtual reality, and augmented reality. There are metaverses dedicated to entertainment, others dedicated to training or the world of industry.
The industrial metaverse allows you to carry out in parallel those activities that require up to now sequential execution: design, development, and control in the revision phase. In this scenario, the industrial metaverse redefines collaboration bringing it to a new level of involvement, merging physical and virtual.
Photorealistic and physics-based digital twins, integrated into the industrial metaverse, offer enormous potential for improving products and processes. A digital twin provides a virtual world where people can interact and collaborate to solve real problems.
The technological blocks that allow the implementation and use of the metaverse have now reached a sufficient level of maturity; the next step is to get the ability to put the pieces together intelligently.
The underlying telecommunications network is a fundamental technological piece of the metaverse. For example, a fiber Internet connection to a powerful gaming computer is already appropriate for the entertainment metaverse. However, the corporate use of applications of the metaverse in a collaborative and multi-user context is beyond the capabilities of a standard corporate network.
To ensure the success of an innovative metaverse project in the enterprise is necessary to redesign the network segments that support metaverse applications. The correct integration of these new areas into the current infrastructure must be assured, as well as their evolution, to keep up with the different metaverse applications that are gradually introduced.
Thanks to its experience with these technologies and the activities already carried out on this topic both in-house and on customers' projects, INRETE represents the ideal partner to build a sound network infrastructure base to support the metaverse.