Industry
Manufacturing
Future-Ready Manufacturing: Partnering in your journey to a sustainable manufacturing enterprise
Highlights
- The automotive industry has been constantly evolving with new innovations driven primarily by digitalization, connected experiences, and changing buyer needs.
- The metaverse is poised to bring about a paradigm shift in this sector by reimagining various functions across the automotive manufacturing value chain, which will translate to cost savings.
- We examine some potential use cases such as redefining customer experience, transforming employee training and service enhancement, and advancing metaverse for automotive operations and payments.
The metaverse: A different reality
The metaverse is a parallel reality or visual representation of reality – a combination of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), or mixed reality (MR), and artificial intelligence (AI).
At the moment, the metaverse only exists partially. Metaverse for global automotive market in 2025 is evaluated at USD 4.16B and expected to exceed USD 119.06B by 2037. Owing to the ability of the metaverse to provide an immersive experience for consumers and vehicle manufacturers alike. The BMW Group is simulating entire factories in real time to optimize production workflows to build vehicle configurations of their end customers.
How the metaverse fundamentally differs from VR-AR is that it obviates the need for wearable devices. Instead, the users can explore a parallel virtual universe through their avatars where they can transact using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It allows human beings to exist, meet, and work as their digital avatars. AI, ML, and GenAI can be applied to weave in gestures and bring voice to the avatars. And a digital twin can help determine and predict any physical asset’s current and future states by analyzing its virtual or digital counterpart.
The common and incorrect conflation is that the metaverse and Web3 are interchangeable terms. A metaverse does not require the decentralized ethos or typical technologies of Web3. It can be built by a Web2 enterprise, as a completely centralized experience. And a Web3 community—which is more about the spirit of decentralization than specific technologies like the blockchain—is not necessarily a metaverse.
The layers that make up the metaverse
The layer-based approach provides a method to analyze the metaverse ecosystem – from the foundational infrastructure to the user experience.
A holistic view of the metaverse in Figure 1 depicts the interplay between its various layers and the non-functional aspects.
Figure 1: The layers of the metaverse and some concerns that cut across the layers
| Layer | Details |
| Layer 1 – Base layer: Internet |
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| Layer 2 – Middle layer: Infrastructure |
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| Layer 3 – Middle layer: Content |
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| Layer 4 – Top layer: Web 3.0 | Immersive metaverse | Virtual space exists alongside the real world
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| Cross-cutting concerns | Non-functional aspects |
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Table 1: Understanding the layers of the metaverse
Some use cases of interest
The metaverse can find good use across the automotive manufacturing industry value chain.
From product innovation and smart manufacturing to marketing and sales, the metaverse shows promise across the value chain (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Metaverse use cases across the automotive industry value chain
From product innovation and smart manufacturing to marketing and sales, the metaverse shows promise across the value chain. Digital twins can be built for assets, specific production lines, by product, or for any other real-world scenario within a production process.
Product innovation: Virtual prototypes and product lifecycle management
By leveraging digital twin simulations for product designs, multiple reviewers can have a look at it and the assets can be made safer or more efficient, by not having to do expensive and time-consuming physical tests. Technology products or platforms can be leveraged for collaborative product design review, engineering automation, and to incorporate AR-VR. Avatars can also be leveraged in collaborative product design. For example, Tesla creates a digital simulation of every one of its cars, using data collected from sensors on the vehicles and uploaded to the cloud. This helps with understanding the as-used behavior and improve over-the-air updates.
Smart manufacturing: Intelligent shop floor quality inspection
Product quality inspection is crucial for product cost reduction and customer satisfaction. If the equipment problems are found early, technicians will spend less time and money on repairs, more importantly, improving uptime. The metaverse enables shop-floor workers to complete inspection quickly, with high-quality and error-free products, at reduced cost. Targeting production quality, Volvo has implemented enterprise AR suite of capabilities and holistic solution towards scaling a digital thread.
Smart manufacturing: Vehicle assembly
In smart vehicles today, many sensors are integrated to make it more comfortable for the passengers. This complex vehicle assembly work requires workers on the shop floor to be more proactive, multi-skilled, and imaginative. AR has emerged as one of the suitable solutions for the assembly line where workers can wear head mounded display (HMD) glasses, get step-by-step work instructions and visual aids superimposed on the assembly line work environment to carry out complex vehicle assembly operations. This allows workers to operate AR solutions through voice commands and focus their hands on the assembly process. This approach greatly enhances efficiency and quality at the assembly line.
Smart manufacturing: Virtual replica of factory production line
The metaverse can help manufacturers to explore a wide variety of versions and estimate how scaling up or down will affect their bottom line. Automation and simulation can help increase output and productivity, and it can make it cheaper to manage resources. BMW’s Debrecen EV plant is a virtual replica of the real-world factory.
Connected supply chain: Inventory management
The metaverse offers a virtual representation of the supply chain, improving coordination and synchronization of processes, reducing lead times, and enhancing inventory management in automotive manufacturing. NFTs will play a key role in inventory management.
Connected supply chain: Warehouse order picking operations
In the traditional order picking method, workers used to spend a lot of time and effort searching for products. Now, imagine a worker wearing an AR glass navigating the aisles. The glasses project the optimized route, highlighting products on shelves to be picked with quantity and providing real-time update on inventory level. This virtual information overlay in warehouse operation minimizes human error and ensures the right product goes into the right box every single time. AR enables warehouse operations to become more efficient and therefore more profitable.
Connected supply chain: Procurement
AR enables procurement teams to visualize product specifications, pricing, and availability in real time. This eliminates the need for manual search through multiple documents, saving time and reducing human errors. Furthermore, we can envision procurement in the metaverse involving the use of virtual currencies, smart contracts, and blockchain technology to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers in the virtual world. This advancement in procurement processes promotes sustainability by reducing the need for physical transportation and reducing the carbon footprint associated with conventional procurement processes.
Sales and distribution: Virtual showroom
The virtual showroom which is a digital platform of physical showroom enables buyers to immerse themselves in dealership showrooms and allows them to customize products (car color, tires, wheel types, and so on), browse the entire range of products, and get quotations through an AI avatar virtual assistance. The implementation is in VR space, which means the user will be wearing a headset and will have a touch and feel experience.
Sales and distribution: Virtual test drive
The automotive industry began exploring VR to offer virtual test drive to prospective buyers to experience the car and determine whether it is suitable for them. This virtual test drive approach enables buyers to remotely explore different features and functions of the car such as starting the engine, adjusting the mirrors and seats, activating the lights, and engaging the safety features like lane departure warning, Forward collision warning and may more in the virtual world from anywhere and anytime. This approach eliminates the need for buyers to physically visit dealerships and can explore a broad range of models, which may not be physically present at nearby dealerships.
Employee training and onboarding
Bringing physical equipment such as cumbersome engines is expensive for training purposes. The auto industry can use metaverse VR and AR tools to make training for new employees more interesting. This can reduce the ‘leakage’ of valuable skills when experienced employees leave and make it easier for teams to share information. Intel designed and developed a training solution leveraging VR. The company equips retirees and new hires with MR headsets so that they may document their work. It is then applied to the behaviors of freshmen.
After-sales services: Field service operations
AR enabled field service operation empowers field service technicians with real-time guided instructions, 3D visuals and remote collaboration capabilities. AR overlays digital information, service manuals, diagrams, maintenance history and digital annotation onto the physical objects to guide technicians to execute complex tasks and reduce human error. The remote collaboration feature enables technicians to collaborate with remote experts through live video conference and remote expert guide technicians troubleshooting the service orders through sticky annotations, screen share feature. Remote collaboration significantly reduces the travel cost, improves customer satisfaction, enhances knowledge sharing and improves response time.
A roadmap for metaverse adoption
So far, users can only explore the virtual worlds integrated into a single metaverse.
In the future, we can expect multiple interoperability enabled metaverse projects that can interact and complement each other. Table 2 lists the technologies that are likely to evolve in this space.
| Organization | Technology stack |
| Microsoft Azure |
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| AWS |
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| Revitalist |
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| Meta (Facebook) |
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| Apple |
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| NVIDIA |
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| Unity, Unreal, Blender, WebXR, MetaVRse, Spatial, Maya, Ready Player Me |
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Table 2: Tech solutions to watch out for as the metaverse evolves
The future of the metaverse spans on an idea of running openly, almost without any interruption from a single community, as the participation of creators will be from across the world. Several automotive companies are looking to open their virtual showrooms on the broader metaverse just like on the internet of the current times. While a completely decentralized and interoperable universal metaverse is the ideal; our reality will more likely be a mix of Web2 and Web3 environments in which the blockchain technology isn’t always used. The metaverse requires massive infrastructure to function, from uninterrupted 6G to high-tech hardware, glasses, sensors, and other wearables, hence we need to look at how to reduce overall TCO.
The metaverse impact on manufacturing is durable and has vast potential; businesses would do well to implement it as soon as possible. By simulating and optimizing manufacturing processes virtually, the metaverse can help identify opportunities to minimize waste, energy consumption, and environmental impact, supporting sustainable practices in automotive manufacturing.
