Industrial metaverse

As the fourth industrial revolution advances – merging physical, digital, and biological domains – the industrial metaverse is poised to become a transformative platform. The virtual platform could host digital twins of real-world assets, enabling enhanced efficiency, predictive simulations. The IEC Societal and technological trend report explores the emerging landscape of the industrial metaverse, highlighting the gap in current standardization efforts which predominantly focus on consumer applications. While organizations such as IEC, ITU, ISO, IEEE, and the Metaverse Standards Forum are actively analyzing metaverse technologies, only a few standardization deliverables address industrial use cases or monetization strategies. The industrial metaverse promises significant benefits: reduced costs in product design, testing and manufacturing, while improving product quality, and streamlining services. Its unified digital ecosystem could yield economic, environmental, and social advantages and opportunities. The authors argue that when leveraged efficiently, the technology can also advance several UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, critical challenges persist, particularly in areas such as privacy, ownership, safety, sustainability, and monetization. In consumer space, for instance, adoption is slowed by reluctance to pay for metaverse-based services. This report identifies key challenges and opportunities within the industrial metaverse, outlines relevant economic and business models, maps the value chain, and defines the value proposition. It also presents industry perspectives on overcoming standardization hurdles from both market and operational standpoints, offering a foundation for future development and collaboration. This IEC societal and technology trend report was developed by the Metaverse Sub-Working Group (SWG 20) of the Societal and Technology Trend Working Group (STTWG) in the IEC Market Strategy Board ( MSB ). This IEC STTR is available for free download .