The consumer, commercial, and industrial realms are the "three categories of innovation" within the metaverse, Microsoft COO Judson Althoff explained at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event. 

Althoff said the consumer metaverse is the realm most are familiar with, which can be anything from bringing avatars to life for more socially immersive experiences to developing new kinds of entertainment through enriched gaming environments. The commercial metaverse is all about taking those same kind of immersive experiences and bringing them into "the world of work" to design the next generation of products with mixed reality capabilities, he added. 

But Althoff revealed that one of his "favorite areas of innovation" is the industrial metaverse. 

The industrial metaverse is all about connecting the physical and digital world to drive industry forward, he said. It combines technologies like IoT sensors to better model manufacturing, supply chain, or logistics processes, and takes the data off those processes and populates it into large scale data lakes in the cloud. 

It's across three frames — designing new products, building products, and optimizing operations — that Althoff said the industrial metaverse will have the most impact. According to him, most analysts estimate the opportunity in the industrial metaverse to exceed over $200 billion by 2030.

Once data is in an "enriched state," organizations can reason over that data using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to build out digital twins of any industrial process, Althoff noted.

Creating digital twins, he said, makes industrial processes more effective and efficient by enabling access and visibility across production lines, and bringing together different data from various systems and sensors. 

Digital twins can also connect into a digital feedback loop with employees on the front lines. By feeding the twin into experiences on handheld devices, it enables employees to "democratize that experience and build out their own app tool chains to have their lives represented in digital form," Althoff explained.

"You can think of this as the model teaching the people and the people teaching the model for real time digital feedback and enhanced learning," he said.

While there is still of room for evolution in each realm of the metaverse, Althoff said the industrial metaverse is "here and now," with what he claims are hundreds of customers already leveraging these capabilities in their day-to-day operations. 

Althoff indicated that sustainability could be one of the biggest benefits presented by the industrial metaverse.

"If you make anything or you move anything, you create a carbon footprint," he said. "If we can simulate that infinitely in the cloud before you make it or before you move it, we can help you build better products more effectively, more efficiently, with lower carbon footprint, lower water utilization, more sustainably than ever before."

Microsoft has already implemented industrial metaverse capabilities with companies like Hellenic — one of the largest bottlers in the Coca Cola ecosystem. Serving 29 markets across Europe, Hellenic has more than 55 facilities across Europe and produces 90,000 bottles of Coca Cola products per hour on one production line alone. 

Althoff said the factory saved over 9% in energy cost in a 12-week period by building out a sensor fabric, creating digital twins, and allowing factory workers to become immersed in the twins.

Many companies often have to build new factories in order to produce more sustainable products, but Althoff noted the building of entirely new infrastructure can be the most impactful to the environment. 

Mercedes' newest factory 56, he said, has figured “out how to thread the needle on that,” and leverage the industrial metaverse to build products simultaneously on one line.

Jörg Burzer, who heads production and supply chain management at Mercedes, made an appearance at the Microsoft Ignite event and said the company is “calculating to create efficiency gains of around 20%” by using the metaverse and data stored in Microsoft Azure Cloud.

“What we can really do is we can simulate what carbon footprint we can manage and improve,” Burzer said, adding that the opportunities presented by the industrial metaverse is something he has “been dreaming about.”