Siemens doubles down on industrial metaverse
Siemens has announced partnerships and products to open up the industrial metaverse to real world applications for businesses.
Making the announcement at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, where the metaverse has emerged as a top topic, Siemens introduced partnerships with Sony, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft that are expected to lay the foundation for the industrial metaverse with the immersive reality it brings for industrial and other users.
The partnership with Sony combines the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of industry software with Sony’s new spatial content creation system, featuring the XR head-mounted display with high-quality 4K OLED microdisplays and controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects.
Expected to be available later in 2024, the Siemens’ NX™ Immersive Designer integrating Siemens’ NX software and the Sony technology is aimed to enable designers and engineers to create and explore design concepts in a borderless immersive workspace.
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The partnership with Amazon Web Services is focussed on enabling businesses to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Siemens is integrating Amazon Bedrock – a service that offers a choice of foundation models from leading AI companies via a single API – with the Mendix low-code platform that is part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio.
“We envision the industrial metaverse as a virtual world that is nearly indistinguishable from reality, enabling people – along with AI – to collaborate in real time to address real-world challenges,” stated Siemens CEO Roland Busch.
“This will empower customers to accelerate innovation, enhance sustainability and adopt new technologies faster and at scale, leading to a profound transformation of entire industries and our everyday lives.”
Siemens describes the industrial metaverse as the concept of the digital world to mirror and simulate, ranging in complexity from individual components up to major systems such as cities and power grids.
At its heart are AI and digital twins and by seamlessly integrating these with technologies such as cloud and edge computing, the industrial metaverse can optimise processes and drive sustainable practices, ultimately shaping the future beyond simulation, the company states.
To drive its vision and grow the Xcelerator ecosystem, Siemens also launched an Xcelerator developer portal to enable developers to explore and access all of Siemens’ and partner APIs.
In collaboration with Microsoft, the developer portal also introduces a chatbot as an AI ‘companion’ intended to enhance the development experience.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.