The Cyber-Physical Metaverse - Where Digital Twins and Humans Come Together

The concept of Digital Twins (DTs) has been discussed intensively for the past couple of years. Today we have instances of digital twins that range from static descriptions of manufacturing data and material properties over live interfaces on operational data of cyber physical systems to the functions and services they provide. Currently, there are no standardized interfaces to aggregate atomic DTs (e.g., the twin of the lowest-level function of a machine) to higher-level DTs providing more complex services in the virtual world. Additionally, there is no existing infrastructure to reliably link the DTs in the virtual world to the integrated CPSs in the physical world, such as a car consisting of many ECUs with even more functions. The concept of the Metaverse is gaining increasing traction and has been explored from different angles, usually centered around a human user, true to its original definition. Beyond social interactions, the Metaverse offers possibilities to integrate layers of interconnected Digital Twins (DTs) representing parts of and interacting with the physical world in real-time, enabling not only analysis and representation of current state, but also feedback loops and control. This paper describes how the Metaverse can become the virtual world where DTs of humans and machines live, and how to reliably connect DTs to the physical world.