TGI5 - Episode 034 - From GIS, Digital Twin to Metaverse

[Anonymous User]

Welcome back to Telecom GIS in Five Minutes. In recent months, the term "Metaverse" has gone viral around the world. And in the last couple of weeks and even today, a lot of announcements were made by major technology, internet, and hardware companies, on how they are going to position themselves in this trend and help push the future of the internet.

So in this episode, I would love to share some of my research and findings, what is my personal take on this 30-year-long revolution, and how Telecom, Geospatial Intelligence, and "Digital Twin" can work together to create such a new world on the horizon.

The term Metaverse is not something brand new in the tech world. But it was actually introduced by Neal Stephenson back in 1992 in his science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and computer agents, the NPCs, in a three-dimensional virtual space that acts like a real world. And we have seen so many films and tv series from Pop Culture that portray the beautiful or horrifying picture of the new world.

The metaverse is a proposed expansion to existing internet technologies. People will access the metaverse through computers and smartphones, in addition to augmented reality (AR), mixed reality, virtual reality (VR), and general virtual world technologies.

But wait a minute, you may think this is something only related to gaming or entertainment. well, you are not 100% wrong, but those two are just some new ways for people to interact and consume content with a new immersive experience. The key here is how these concepts, with the rapid development of hardware, software, and network technology is the shape and support the future of the business world, industrial activities, and your personal and social lifestyles.

Edge computing and 5G are currently building a solid foundation from the network infrastructure side to provide superb processing power, lightning-fast network connectivity with low latency to make this all possible. And GIS is at the forefront of helping network builders and operators to accelerate their NextGen network rollout, from market analytics, design, and engineering, and towards the real-time perspective of network monitoring.

And because we want to make it real, and provide that immersive real-world experience for the users, companies are leverage different data models with GIS and 3D engines, such as the landscape information model, city information model, or indoor information model, plus all kinds of asset information models to recreate a digital twin of the real world, that we can virtually experience what is in reality as a digital format.

But I do not think Metaverse's ultimate goal should be just a one-sided experience, where we as users, only consume the data that is fed to us or just use it as a platform to talk to another human being just with another virtual avatar or appearance. I think the visionaries and technologists are pushing this because of the potential of how we interact with our real world through the metaverse.

As Jack has mentioned, GIS is an intelligent nervous system for the planet. It has been serving as the system of record, a system of engagement, and a system of insights, to capture real-world data, share data across people, and find trends and patterns for us to better understand the world and make better prepared when disasters occur. And with the help from different types of system integration, these static maps or asset data are now coming alive. We can now bring in the Real-Time aspect of our IoT feature, and leverage AI and ML to help us predict or respond to specific situations, such as emergencies when decision making need to be quick and accurate.

And this is how I feel about this Metaverse trend, with Metaverse being the true digital twin of the real world, and humans in the Universe participate and interact within it virtually, and be able to do things that we were only able to do in person against real-world objects and operations. Tilting or rotating a cell tower antenna, smart manufacturing with only robots that are programmed and controlled by AI and monitored by us. And geospatial being a very important part of it is, to tie them together with XYZ in the real world and also the new XYZ in the Metaverse.

Thank you for your time today, and we will continue to show you more about how it is being done with GIS for telecom like we always do.

While you are here, also check out:

ArcGIS: A Foundation for Digital Twins - Link

IoT and GIS, Creating the Nervous System for Digital Twins - Link

Digital Twins Enable Innovation and Savings - Link

Till the next time, we out.

Junjie Ma | Solutions Engineer |  Telecommunications