On June 29, Siemens and Nvidia announced that they will drive the transformation of the manufacturing industry through precise visualizations that connect design, manufacturing and operations. As a first step, the companies are linking Siemens' Xcelerator business platform with the Nvidia Omniverse 3D design and collaboration platform. According to the two companies, this will enable an industrial metaverse with physically supported, digital models from Siemens in combination with real-time AI from Nvidia.

The Metaverse department of the German Digital Economy Association (BVDW) has now drawn up a definition for the vision of a metaverse and defined six layers of the metaverse construct.

The Metaverse definition

The ultimate vision of the Metaverse is a decentralized, interoperable, persistent digital ecosystem with unlimited user capacity that can be perceived with all the senses. It will coexist with the physical world in both augmented (AR) and purely virtual reality (VR). The fully developed Metaverse will merge with real life and fundamentally change our society and the way we connect, work, live and interact with brands.

The six layers of the Metaverse

The six layers of the metaverse.

© BVDW

From the department's perspective, the metaverse is made up of six different layers. The network forms the basis. This includes connectivity in order to offer low latency and high bandwidths. The second layer, the IT infrastructure, represents the brain, so to speak, where all connections converge, experiences are stored and which makes it efficient. This includes, for example, the architecture, computing power and storage capacity. The soul of the Metaverse is the third level, the mechanisms. In other words, the processes, privacy and security, but also the apps that are required. The creative content and trading mechanisms, including data storage for the NFTs and tokens, also belong to this level. The software component gives the metaverse the capabilities it needs to function, so to speak. The Interaction Devices level (access devices) is understood as the gateway to the metaverse. This includes the hardware components that the user needs to enter the metaverse and to interact with it. In addition to VR/AR glasses for audio-visual perceptions, this also includes all wearables that will provide a haptic feeling, among other things. The top and final level is the virtual worlds themselves. It forms the world of experience in which all events from the B2B or B2C sector, the avatars and also the virtual goods are contained.