Meta Asset Industry

What is the Meta Asset Industry?

Industry definition is the intersection of 3 markets to derive a new emergent market space of “Meta Assets”.  This newly formed “Meta Assets” Industry is defined by the convergence and intersection of the:

  1. Industrial Metaverse Algorithm Market

  2. Cryptographic Smart Digital Asset Market

  3. Intellectual Property Market

The “Meta Assets” Market is characterized by the ability to package Digital Twin algorithm assets into a Non-Fungible Token to support world-wide exchange, ownership, history, validation, verification, licensing, agreements, intellectual property, and more. 

Digital Twin

The Digital Twin, while being an imperfect descriptor, forms the core building block of the Industrial Metaverse.  

At the heart of the concept, a Digital Twin can be represented as a ‘black box’, taking inputs and transforming them into outputs, just as a real world process or machine would.  Inside the ‘black box’ can exist some combination of algorithms, analytics, models, physics, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other mechanisms of manipulating raw data inputs to outputs.  

A Digital Twin is a digital representation of a physical asset, system, or network.  Digital Twins range in variety of their approximation to the physical world.  Just as the personal avatar in the Social Metaverse is the truest representation of a human, in the Industrial Metaverse, the truest representation of real world assets, systems, and networks will be those that precisely simulate reality in a reactive real-time bi-directional, synchronous, high-fidelity, closed-feedback-loop process.  

  • Think about the power grid, the largest man-made machine today, with countless interconnected electrical components that stretch and span every corner of the globe - all to serve the purpose of providing sustainable, reliable, and resilient electricity. Today, simulations occur by modeling the functions of electrical networks. But the grid edge is changing at a slow but exponential pace. The grid of the future has to reconcile the shifts of physical architecture, digital architecture, and how key assets will have to be designed, operated, and monitored differently to support the future landscape of distributed generation and load-side technologies. The grid is evolving from one-way power flows and simple interactions, to a grid with two-way power flows and multi-stakeholder interactions (integrated Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as solar PV, EVs, wind, etc.). This results in an ever-increasing complex flow of electrons, but a complex flow of data too.

    In the Industrial Metaverse, grid assets can be represented by Digital Twins, and the electrical network model can be extended with each node representing a grid asset Digital Twin and each vertice representing their interconnection properties. Powering high fidelity simulations that are able to optimize against various competing dynamics, as well as truly powering decentralized transactive peer-to-peer exchange of energy.

  • Design-build-test-operate cycles for complete engineering design in the real world take a tremendous amount of time. As an example, by some accounts, it takes 15-20 years to launch a new airplane, and the multitudes of prototypes and tests and iterations (Domun, 2016). Now imagine one can shorten this timeframe via an end-to-end simulation not only of aircraft dynamics, but the entire test and production chain - iterating through thousands, if not millions of variations at the individual part-level to get the perfect optimized design. The realization of such a concept would be the creation of complete virtual factories. Companies and design teams would utilize the services of these virtual factories to guide their real world pursuits. Additionally, utilizing the services of these factories would entail new businesses and business models - opening the door to a completely new market.

    It would allow for the decoupling of ‘design-build-test’ and ‘operate’ - creating net-new companies that own the virtual space of ‘design-build-test’ alone.

  • The ‘Industrial Metaverse of Everything’ is the extension of the Internet of Things (IoT), but it is more than that. It picks-up from the aspirations of where the Internet of Things and analytics are heading, but have yet to reach. Imagine a paradigm where interacting with assets in the real world is as simple as pointing a camera and scanning a QR code. That QR code then allows individuals to access an application whereby real-time performance is displayed of that asset, to detect problems, and conduct routine inspections and maintenance as needed. This would only be made possible via representing assets, systems, and networks with Digital Twins and interacting Digital Twins.

    In this example, machines do not function in a totally autonomous mode, there is a human-in-the-loop. This will remain for some time until concepts of self-healing machine design are incorporated into the manufacture and operation of assets in the first place.

    What’s more is the ability to create new maintenance models for servicing, inspections, diagnostics, and repairs. Smart maintenance schemes can operate by simulating virtual representations of assets, and entirely new virtual operations centers can be formed to conduct 24x7x365 surveillance.

Example Value Propositions Unlocked by the Industrial Metaverse

What is the Metaverse?

The Social Metaverse according to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta keynote is one where immersive technologies will create rich interactions and user experiences (Founder's Letter, 2021 | Meta, 2021), (Centieiro, 2022).  Digital interactions will have the feeling of presence and location via an embodied Internet (Goldsmith, 2021). Real-life interactions will bleed through the digital realm in high-fidelity avatar-based personal representations, allowing for the depiction of your facial features, your micro-expressions, and your personality (What Is an Avatar in the Metaverse?, 2022). Digital social connectedness will be truly coupled with a purely digital economy in the Metaverse - a largely missing component today (Inside the Metaverse Economy, Jobs and Infrastructure Projects Are Becoming Real, 2022).  

In the Social Metaverse, you would exist as a high fidelity, digital representation or virtual reality version of yourself - your Digital Twin.  This virtual reality representation is made possible with technologies such as AR, VR, enhanced facial recognition, digital facial constructions, face tracking, camera technologies, computer vision, and more.  All with the end-purpose of creating a very lifelike avatar.  The interactions between these very lifelike avatars in a digital world would result in net new value propositions: virtual meetings, virtual concerts, virtual dates, virtual travel, virtual experiences, and more.  

The Metaverse is the evolution, convergence, conjoining, and interaction of a number of technologies that must combine together.  It is a bold undertaking, but one that will create a wholly new set of digital companies, platforms, and business models.  By Q4 2021, the median Earnings Value-to-Revenue multiplier for Metaverse companies was 4.9x with the biggest valuation criteria for a Metaverse project or token coming from the user base (Metaverse & Virtual Reality: 2022 Valuation Multiples, 2022), (How Do You Value Metaverse Projects? We Tried. Here's What We Found, 2022).  And giants in industry continue to invest including Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Adobe, and others.  

Just as the “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI) in quantum mechanics instantiates the presence of infinite universes, there are also infinite Metaverses, infinite virtual worlds, all with their special governing properties and purposes (Gribbin, 2020).  To that end, an Industrial Metaverse is being built to allow for rich man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine level interactions.  In this way, a machine is defined as any real world physical asset that is governed by the laws of physics (mechanical, electrical, fluid, thermal, chemical, biological properties of operation).  

What is the Industrial Metaverse?

The Industrial Metaverse is one where man-to-machine and machine-to-machine rich interactions will be both bi-directional and synchronous in real-time to precisely simulate reality in a reactive high-fidelity closed-feedback-loop process (Burian, 2022). This definition of simulating reality in a reactive high-fidelity closed-feedback-loop process is also the truest definition of Digital Twin - the core building block of the Industrial Metaverse (Burton et al., 2022).  

The Industrial Metaverse will be powered by a network of interacting Digital Twins.  Outputs of one Digital Twin algorithm can serve as the input of another Digital Twin - simulating complex interactions that occur in the real world today.