Confluence of Digital Twins and Metaverse for Consumer Electronics: Real World Case Studies

Abstract

Digital twins and Metaverse have independent applications across several industries, such as manufacturing, art, construction, healthcare, transportation, automotive, and aerospace, but they can be seamlessly integrated, thanks to their mutually supportive and complementary features, enabling several highly improvised applications. For the first time, we explore the impact of the confluence of digital twins and Metaverse on the consumer electronics industry and elaborately describe the concerning applications. To understand the practicality and feasibility of the proposed applications, we implemented three case studies: robot-based digital twin-enabled remote consumer electronics manufacturing, digital twin-enabled consumer electronics showroom experience in the Metaverse, and digital twin-aided collaborative design and development of consumer electronics. We have built the case studies using actual hardware and software related to digital twins and Metaverse, like Meta Quest 2 and Harfang3D. We have created a digital twin of Reachy with the help of URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) files and modeled the translation of real-world movements to virtual-world movements using inverse kinematics.