Siemens and NVIDIA plan to pair digital twin models with real-time AI to create what the two companies are calling an industrial metaverse.
 
“The digital twin is the virtual representation of the real product and the value of that digital twin is how closely we can bring the virtual world and the real world together,” Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens explained in a press briefing.
 
The merger of the two companies’ technologies means “we can now fuse data from the point of design, all the way through product life cycle management, all the way through the automation of plants to the optimization of the plant after deployment — that entire life cycle can now be in one world,” NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

The two companies promise that the industrial metaverse will allow manufacturing customers of any size to be able to immediately analyze issues, identify root causes, and simulate and optimize solutions, thanks to the AI-infused, real-time photo realistic virtual environments. So, for example, if something goes wrong on the factory floor, teams of users from around the world will be able to meet, virtually, to collaborate and use the connected digital twin to quickly identify, troubleshoot and solve the problem.

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Wood has always played an important role in the production of bourbon, but Woodinville Whiskey is taking it to a whole new level. The U.S. company’s newly completed warehouse (pictured here) - one of six 25,000 square-foot structures that will house its small-batch bottling, barrelling, and ageing facilities in a rural part of Washington state - is being built with an eco-friendly modified wood that serves as an alternative to building materials with a much higher carbon footprint.
 
Produced by Oslo-based Kebony, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, the modified wood has also been used to build hotels, apartment buildings, a theater, and family homes in Europe and the United States over the past 36 months. It’s part of a trend. Wood not only reduces the amount of Co2 used in the building process; it serves as a carbon sink, storing the Co2 taken from the air by trees that are harvested and used as engineered timber.
 
The race to Net Zero is putting pressure on all companies to reduce their carbon footprint and is changing the way buildings are constructed and renovated, says Norman Willemsen, CEO of Kebony, which describes itself as an “environmentally friendly wood modification technology company.”
 
“Kebony is very much in demand as an alternative to products like concrete, steel and tropical wood,” he says. “We provide a safer, better, greener construction material.”