Immersive technologies through the industrial metaverse and AI-based automation will underpin engineering for years to come.
An engineer working in isolation with only an AI robot and interactive holograms for company is surely just a Marvel creation for Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit, isn’t it? This engineering vision, albeit in a work of fiction, typifies Hollywood’s sci-fi approach to featuring futuristic technologies: make it fanciful and beyond the realms of our current world, but also make it plausible. Just enough reality to make us dream—at least for now.
Is this really what future engineers will look like? Many elements of Iron Man exist today, from UK-based Gravity Industries’ jet pack suits through to MIT’s tensor holography technology. We have robotics and a nascent AI with OpenAI’s ChatGPT currently giving us a glimpse of how automation could help accelerate information access and analytics.
For now, Iron Man is a long way from reality. But emerging immersive technologies like the industrial metaverse reveal a different type of future engineer that we can already glimpse in the present. We are on the cusp of a significant transformation in how engineers work that will impact skills and how projects are structured, managed and delivered.
The Metaverse is Coming
While the key to this revolution will be digital twins, the metaverse will bring unprecedented levels of collaboration and project interaction. Multiple engineering teams within an organization’s entire value chain—all of the suppliers, and in some cases even customers—will be able to work in real time on a particular project.
“It’s no longer a scale drawing or a 3D model that’s still limited by the size of the screen,” says Dale Tutt, Vice President of Industry Strategy for Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Once an engineer is immersed in a project design or modeled construction, they will not be limited by that scale.”
This will really change the way engineers can visualize products, parts and other environmental influences. Naturally, this will also impact skills development. The proliferation of immersive technologies will demand an intimate understanding of their capabilities. The immersive environment will be second nature, a baseline expectation for engineering project development, from concept to completion. This is already leading to interest in gaming engines, such as Unreal and Unity, both of which have recently developed courses targeting engineers.
The gaming influence will only grow. Gamers familiar with worlds such as Minecraft (perhaps even Civilization and the SimCity series) will understand the development process, and to a certain extent the tools required. Minecraft is a hugely popular game, claiming 176 million players in January this year. It has a VR edition and there is already talk of metaverse development. The point is that the line between gaming and engineering will become increasingly blurry. In theory, at least, this should make the engineering profession more attractive and competitive when it comes to young talent.
For existing engineers, it is already important to start thinking in these terms. Of course, it is still very early days, but familiarity with immersive engines and tools will only help to shape thinking around their influence on day-to-day tasks and activities. Being comfortable with the tools, the visualization and the power of the metaverse, and bringing digital twins into the mix when designing and analyzing new products, will bring competitive advantage.
“It’s vitally important for engineers to start looking at this now because I don’t think that we fully understand how the metaverse will be applied to the engineering process,” says Tutt. “Many companies are still trying to understand that. As we start to apply the metaverse to many of the day-to-day tasks and activities, these engineers are going to discover new ways of using it.”
AI and Robots Will Enhance the Role
Many engineers are also asking about generative AI and how it will influence the industry. ChatGPT has been a revelation recently, capturing the imagination of what could be possible in the near future. It’s just the start, but for now AI will not replace engineering jobs; it will only enhance them.
Engineering teams can spend much of their time doing data administration tasks instead of engineering tasks. AI will help solve data issues and manage data requirements more effectively depending on projects and goals. Think of AI as being a robot assistant, automating and accelerating the “what” and the “how” while engineers focus on the “why.”
“AI is going to help automate many of these workflows and work processes,” says Tutt. “That is going to free up engineers to be more creative and more innovative.”
Engineers will also bring context to projects. AI will enable those projects to be set-up and run more quickly and ultimately completed in less time. It will be a symbiotic relationship between machine and human, with the human always in control and offering a “sanity check” to anything produced through automation. Think of NASA’s Katherine Johnson (one of the main characters in the movie Hidden Figures) whose mathematical genius was regularly called upon to check the numbers generated through machines. There has to be a process of validation.
However, unlike in Johnson’s time, validation will be more collaborative. That is what the technology will allow and what teams will expect.
For engineers, this will all mean a shift in skills development but also in daily roles and even in accountability. With more powerful visualizations based on real-time data analytics, increased collaboration across engineering teams will mean more transparency of projects throughout an organization. It will enable teams to react more quickly to changing needs of customers or real environments.
Project lead times will shorten as automation, collaboration and interaction reduce friction and bottlenecks, and therefore reduce delays. The ability to leverage skills, regardless of location, will also enhance daily working life, while metaverse immersion will lead to less travel time to customer and project sites. Imagine not having to bring teams from around the globe together for several months just to do joint collaboration and joint development. Every iteration would demand a new meeting. Every alteration would impact productivity and delivery times.
History has shown us that with technology, progress is often gradual. Technology adoption within industry can be piecemeal. There are occasions where industry bucks the trends—think automotive and the proliferation of robots in factories—but often it comes down to return on investment. For engineers today and tomorrow, it is almost impossible not to see an immersive future. The ROI will become self-evident as organizations not only see reduced operational costs in how projects are run, but also how projects can be more profitable and how firms can take on more work.
While engineering companies face up to the challenge of a competitive future, as technology becomes a common denominator in so many industries, how they adopt and then adapt to the industrial metaverse will be key. The building blocks are there, with digital twins and increased immersive experiences. With increased cloud adoption and scalable computing power, opportunities to embrace these technologies on a broader scale will emerge.
For engineers, this is an opportunity to learn and to grow and ultimately be part of a future that, until now, has only been a distant dream of science fiction.
