OPC UA Connects the Industry to the Metaverse

Summary

Nov. 14 , 2023 – The OPC Foundation is pleased to announce the completion and publication of its Metaverse work. After needs for a standardized Metaverse solution being raised by Dr. Holger Kenn, Microsoft, in October 2022 the Board of Directors of the OPC Foundation decided to establish a Working Group to ensure OPC UA is well suited for the Metaverse use-cases.

In less than one year the group, chaired by Erich Barnstedt, Microsoft, finished its work and published the results. The groups quick success was enabled by OPC UA already providing standardized solutions to the important requirements like information modelling, information exchange, cloud connectivity and asset identification.

 

With this base being available to the working group the main task became bringing the necessary pieces together to provide solutions for the use cases:

• Remote or on-premises condition monitoring using augmented and virtual reality technology
• Remote assisted maintenance of machinery carried out by local workers with the assistance of remote experts.
• Production processes training in safe, simulated environments for real-world tasks in hazardous environments
• Manufacturing logistics planning and execution using head-up display technology for drivers of transport systems.

The code for those solutions has been open-sourced and published on the OPC Foundation GitHub repositories for the industry to get a quick success when establishing their Metaverse concepts and products:

• Condition monitoring sample application built on Unity
• OPC Foundation UA Sample Client application capable of running on HoloLens for remote assisted maintenance

The YouTube channel of the OPC Foundation also provides an instructive recording detailing the standardized solutions for public access.

About the OPC Foundation

Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, process and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable, interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 960 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical and Smart Energy sectors.