Industrial metaverse prototype makes managing workers look like a tycoon game

New research from a pair of scientists in Finland details how populating the metaverse with digital twins called “Metahumans” could turn employee management into something more like a video game than a traditional optimization program.

Status quo employee management systems monitor productivity, time on schedule and other step-based metrics. Managers of the future, however, may be able to take advantage of the “industrial metaverse” where at-a-glance statistics and attributes for workers could be made available in real-time.

In a paper dubbed “MetaStates: An Approach for Representing Human Workers Psychophysiological States in the Industrial Metaverse,” researchers from Tampere University describe a system in which digital twins — graphical avatars used in the metaverse to represent humans in the real world — can be modified to display relevant data for workers.

Per the paper:

“A MetaHuman goes beyond the visual representation, including internal traits of the person it represents, such as their emotions and cognitive states.”

The researchers show that photorealistic avatars can be manipulated to display emotion and status indicators such as frowning or exasperated facial expressions to indicate a worker is tired or stressed.

Ostensibly, this would allow managers to conduct on-the-fly evaluations of worker status that include visual references to worker location, activity and physiological state.

In a factory setting, for example, managers could move beyond monitoring data streams for alerts in between conducting floor inspections. Instead, they could monitor the working environment as a whole within the metaverse. Essentially, this would allow supervisors to keep their eyes on operations and employees at the same time.

The killer app for MetaStates and MetaHumans, however, could be their use in developing simulations. With enough data, they could be applied to industrial simulations to determine optimum work strategies for live teams, new safety measures, and potential performance and output.

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