Materializing the Energy Metaverse with Kevin O'Donovan: Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP21

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book, I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse. The investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview, I interviewed Kevin o'. Donovan. Kevin is a technology evangelist looking at technology and innovation around the energy transition. He's the founder of the boutique technology consultancy company A Bit of this and that focused on the intersection of technology and the energy industry, delivering innovative technology consultations, sales advisory speaker and B2B influencer services. During the interview, we covered the Internet of Things and Digital Twins and how important they are for the Metaverse and how they will define the enterprise Metaverse. We also discussed how governments can benefit from the immersive Internet and how it could disrupt the energy sector. Enjoy the conversation.

Sir, maybe we can start with a bit of background and how you are involved in the Metaverse.

Sure. So my background is I've always been in enterprise IT, technical sales. So I was with Compaq, HP and most recently I was 13 years with Intel. And long story short, I ended up heading up Intel's sales and marketing into the energy industry. So at intel we were always looking for, I suppose, new ways of driving compute. So you know, before Internet of Things was a thing we were doing embedded, we started looking at smart meters and can we put an intel chip in smart meters? Then it was starting to get into drones and ar, seismic simulation, hpc, whatever, all the new, latest and greatest kind of technology. So we're always working with big energy companies, trying to get them to adopt the latest and greatest tech. The model being that if Shell went off and did something with VR, then the rest of them would look at it and go, hang on a second, what are they up to? We need to do that as well. So that was kind of the model, if that makes sense.

Fair enough, that makes sense. Yeah.

Long story short, finished, intel asked us to relocate back to Munich about five years ago, decided to stay here and go off and do stuff on my own.

So.

So I've been an independent consultant since and I spend my time looking at technologies right across the energy sector, both oil and gas, utilities, and I suppose, kind of bridging the gap. And what I mean by that is I'm not a super techie on any particular technology, but I do a lot of work with different management teams at energy companies, suppliers in terms of what's going on with energy storage. And the latest one is I did a session at European Utility Week on the energy Metaverse, because it's the new buzzword and someone explain to us what the hell's going on. So at a high level, if that makes sense.

That makes sense. Very good. Well, I'm very curious to hear then what your thoughts are of what is the Metaverse according to you.

To me, it's simply the next iteration of how we're using digital technology to, I suppose, enhance our world. You mentioned it earlier in that in some ways there's a bit of a perfect storm. I know that's a bit of a cliche, but you're getting the technology, you're getting the platform, you're getting the cloud, you're getting the digital twins. Now, I don't believe we're going to have the metaverse next year. You know, it's an ongoing thing, but I do think there's a lot of convergence of different technologies and it's just the next iteration of how we're, particularly in the energy industrial world, how we're going to use what I call dynamic digital twins going forward.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. We'll get to that in a second. About the dynamic digital twin successor that I haven't heard before, but before we get to that, how important is augmented reality and virtual reality for the Enterprise metaverse?

I don't know what the metaverse will look like. I think there'll be a lot of metaverses or system of systems or whatever, but certainly for an immersive experience, whether that's AR or VR, they're going to be key. But I think one of the biggest challenges is that not everybody's going to be wearing a VR headset next year or in five years time, unless there's again, a revolutionary breakthrough in, I don't know, some sort of contact lens that works for everybody. And away we go. With today's technology, not everyone's going to be wearing VR. It's got its challenges, so it's a key piece of the puzzle. But I think what companies are doing with kind of being able to this mixed reality, if you want to call it, where some people will be on a 2D screen looking at what's going on and other people will be in that virtual world. So I do think it's a key enabler, but I don't think it's a. We don't have to wait for everybody to suddenly be using VR before this thing will keep going in the energy world. And given what's gone on with the pandemic in the last two years, augmented reality is a more must have. And what I mean by that is in terms of enabling remote work, you've had energy companies commissioning new power plants, wind turbines, fixing things, basically with a guy walking around with a smartphone in his hand, kind of with some guy saying, can you show me whatever cut the red wire? Because the best comment I heard about 12 months ago now on a Real Wear conference was said that the smartest guy in the room is the only guy in the room or girl. So we can't fly people in. So I think that's changed the way workflows work. So that whole concept of augmented reality, whether that's a. Sometimes it's just a body cam, but now there's going to be overlays and headsets. And I think that's going to have a bigger impact in the enterprise before VR for a wider use case, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes definitely sense. So you basically expect that AR will lead the way in the enterprise metaverse compared to VR? Because I think in the consumer metaverse, it's the other way around.

Correct. And again, I suppose it depends on your use case. Right. I came across VR good few seven or eight years ago now, at least it was an energy company training firefighters to get around nuclear plants. And I was like, God, what are they up to? And they said, well, we can't send people in there, so we have to create a. We did lidar scans and blah, blah, blah. So there are certain use cases that will lead with VR. But if you like mass adoption in something like the energy industry, which is relatively conservative. Right. I think it's ar. And that's a lot to do with the fact that, oh, I didn't realize we don't have to send 50 engineers to commission something somewhere anymore. Yeah, that's changed the workflows. And I think that's the, you know, I always say technology is the easy bit. It's how us humans use it and integrate it into workflows is the hard bit.

Definitely, I completely agree with that. And somehow related to that, how Important is the what is the role of the Internet of Things in the enterprise metaverse.

So to me that's one of the critical pieces. And this is back to what I mean by the. It's kind of links into the digital twin or whatever. So the Internet of Things allows us to get real time data for what's going on in the real world. So it's a physical representation in a digital format. I think the key thing we could have the best AR VR headsets on the planet and Internet access for 5G for everybody. But if you don't have a virtual world that you can use, well then you know, we can go off play Fortnite. But that's not going to work in the enterprise. So without the Internet of Things being able to gather the data, in some ways that's the data foundation for the virtual world, then in the enterprise space you won't, unless you're doing a meeting or a conference or something, you won't have that virtual world. So the Internet of Things enables the creation of that what I call dynamic digital twin that then creates that virtual world that we can collaborate inside.

Yeah. And so from that perspective, so you have, of course you have the Internet of Things. You have to also the industrial Internet of things, I guess they serve the same in this regard.

It is, it's just the Internet of things in an industrial environment, like Siemens, abb, Schneider, eva, all the big oil gas companies, they look at that as industrial.

Yeah, yeah. So how do you think that, you know the amount of sensors that we have? Because I read somewhere that in 2030 we'll have like 100 trillion sensors. And of course one IT device can have hundreds of sensors. What is your projection? What's your idea that what will happen in the next five to 10 years?

If you look at the energy industry, if anyone's building anything new today, so if you're building new infrastructure, so obviously renewables, but hydrogen, whatever, if you're building anything new, it's going to be instrumented. Right. It's almost impossible not to get something that doesn't have some sort of sensor in there. So you're going to be collecting all the data and the likes of Siemens, abb, Schneider, ge, you name it, they all are gone down the path of oh well, if we collect the data, we'll do predictive maintenance and undead. It's more challenging in brownfield sites because simply. Okay, well you know, one of the features with a lot of the technology that's been put in for the last 10 or 15 years, they all have sensors, but no one ever connected them. And a guy drove up in a truck once every 12 months and maybe stuck in a USB key and downloaded some stuff, but most of the time they didn't. So I think the biggest change in the last 24 months and for the next couple of years is actually using the sensors that are out there already and collecting that data. And today they're still very much siloed. And you know, the asset management guys have their data and the operations guys have their SCADA system. So there's a lot of work being done to kind of try and let's, what do you call it, a data lake or whatever, you know, try and get all the one version of the truth, all the real data. And what I'm starting to see is more and more people are saying it's back into the digital twin thing in terms of, look, if you're designing a new widget, a new transformer, a new oil refinery, there'll be a digital design. If I may, that would be a static design. So that's what we're going to build. So they have that from day one, a brownfield site. They're out there doing lidar scans and satellite images and body cams and whatever, drone pictures, creating a real world view. But again, that's a kind of a static snapshot. What they're starting to do is then take the real time data coming off. Well, this motor is running and what's its revs and its temperature and the oil pressure and whatever, and using that to augment the static digital twin to kind of give real time information. So that's where you get started getting to the dynamic model. So if something changes, you actually see it in the, instead of just a 2D control system, you see it in a 3D digital twin model. And to give you an idea of kind of one of the things I've seen, I was over in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks back at Adepec Aviva. I'm not sure how you pronounce Aveva. They're a big services industrial IoT company. They had a training simulator for training a guy in an oil refinery. And again, most if you went to an energy conference for the last three or four years, everyone had a VR demo of something, right? And they were cartoony and whatever, but it's kind of just a cool tech. What they were using was they were taking a digital twin simulation model. So inside, in the VR environment, if you, if you open the wrong valve, it used the simulation tool to tell you what would happen inside in the virtual world. So you got feedback as opposed to just following a static training script. So I think that's where it's headed in terms of dynamic feedback of something's going on the grid, something's going on their oil refinery. And that that virtual world reflects the real world, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And how far are we off that the real world will affect the virtual world, if you know what I mean.

It depends. So forget about the metaverse for right now. So if you look at a lot of the. The latest and greatest digital twins from the likes of Siemens, ABB, Schlumberger, whatever, but Adnoc what EDF and what they're doing, they have a 2D digital twin, you know, it's a SCADA system, but the next version, let's say. So they're all able to see what's going on in the grid or in the oil refinery. And whatever. It may not all be in the cloud, a lot of it is still private because of security and, and, and, but they're seeing a digital representation of the real world in a 2D environment. So they get alarms and alerts and there's more AI. AI means many things to many people, but there's more expert systems kind of kicking into. We've seen this do that, or they're encouraging operators to do certain activities as opposed to totally automated. But like the whatever Saudi Aramco, Kannor in Norway, they're all now running completely automated offshore platforms. So there's a guy sitting in a control center somewhere just watching what's going on. So they're completely automated now. It's still a tiny percentage of, let's say, the existing infrastructure. But you know, this is where some of them have robot dogs walking around the place now with a camera on it, so that if the guy needs to go see what's going on in a particular place, the dog walks off a spot or something, you know. Now again, this is all bleeding edge. Right. So it is happening, but it isn't by no stretch of the imagination mainstream. And they're still all worried about the cost and whatever, but it is starting to happen and people are starting to take notice.

Yeah. But then the other way around there. So when do you think that the real world will affect the virtual world? As in I am in virtual reality on the oil rig and I turn a valve open and the same thing happens in real life.

I would imagine just probably somebody piloting that in some R and D lab somewhere today. If you look at some of what the More progressive guys are up to. But in terms of doing it, Adnoc and Equinor do that today with a 2D world. Doing it in the 3D world or the Metaverse or whatever you want to call it, virtual world, couple of years away, I'd say the technology exists, but will it become an established work stream? I think we'll see people talking about it. You have to hand it to Facebook for doing some great stuff in terms of jumping on the meta and the metaverse and whatever. But I think that's damaged the industrial perception of Metaverse because you say metaverse and oil and gas and they go, facebook, we're not Facebook. And you kind of go, yes, digital representative, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, so there's. I think that's probably done more harm than good. Microsoft are doing a better job. Nvidia doing a better job with their Omniverse. That's more industrial. Right. People understand that. You say Facebook and they kind of go, oh, God, even work the horizon workrooms. Right. It's really cool. But there's very few companies jumping at that right now in oil and gas.

Yeah, I can imagine. I think that's what you see happening, and that's what I said at the start. I've talked to very few people who focus on the enterprise metaverse, but I think for me that's as important. You know, having been in digital transformation for about a decade now, the metaverse is just the next iteration of the Internet. So. And that also applies to enterprise organizations, whether you are a manufacturer energy or oil and gas or whatever type of company. So from that perspective, I agree with you. I think Facebook did a fantastic job to help people understand what the metaverse is, but they somehow screwed up. Indeed. Because everyone thinks that the metaverse is about gaming and lackless avatars.

Yeah, that's a feature. The amount of people like that would say to me, abby, but I've seen that's a Facebook thing. You have to have a Facebook logon to use it. You know, it's bending our company. You know, this kind of stuff.

Right.

I don't see. And again, I can't speak for any of these, but I don't see a lot of the industrial companies talking about the Metaverse because their brand marketing folks are going, we don't want to be associated with Facebook. And yet talking about, you know, Siemens tagline is physical meets digital Metaverse for transparency. I do work with Siemens. I'm a part of their influencer community. We meet with Cedric, Nike and them Every now and again. I'd said that to him months ago. What they're doing is creating an industrial Metaverse, like you can the latest factories from Siemens, from abb, from, you know, pick a big industrial player. They call it adaptive manufacturing. The ability to reconfigure your production line, whatever, using the terminal. They brought out new digital twin technology where if I'm building a whatever it is, something out of metal, if I change the type of metal based on the carbon footprint, how do I simulate how that will work over X amount of years and that. So all that's being done under the covers. You know, Siemens, abb, a bunch of them, they all integrate with Nvidia's Omniverse. Right. They've built in their APIs. So that's all happening under the covers. But they're not calling it Metaverse, I think, and this is my personal opinion, because there's an association there that they don't want to be seen as consumer.

It's interesting. I actually reached out to Cedric Neike yesterday and I hope he will respond to me. We are connected to LinkedIn and actually my sister used to work for him. So very small world. I'm quite curious because I'd love to speak to Siemen because I think it's really interesting work what they're doing there in terms of digital twins. And Thursday I'm talking to Nvidia Omniverse because that's also a very important player in the field.

Yeah, no, they've been doing a lot of great stuff, obviously in oil and gas. A lot of people would know Nvidia simply because of the seismic high performance computing, less so in the utility space because they'd be seen as a graphics chip. And what do we need graphics chip for? But that just. Again, that's my comment. Historical background. But what they've been doing with the Omniverse, like they've had Omniverse what, year and a half. So you could say they're well ahead of the game. And as I say, the likes of Siemens and them have been putting their PLM software with APIs into the omniverse. So that's all going on behind the covers now. You're not using a virtual reality headset to look at the stuff, but you do have a digital twin. And the digital twin, based on the Internet of Things data is the key building block for any industrial Metaverse, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I just want to shift gears a little bit because I also, as you can see, I have a question about new governments, how they can benefit from the metaverse. And then I said, for example, virtual public square. But I think, more importantly, I think looking into smart cities. And what do you think is the potential of the combination Metaverse and smart cities?

If an industrial player or a utility. And what was it? It's two years ago now, ENEL publicly announced that they were building a network digital twin. They actually trademarked the name. And what they were doing was that their vision at the time, and they're still doing a lot of it, is obviously with all the Internet of things data they're getting from smart meters and the grid transformers and substations and, and, and, but they were also, they had guys gone out with a backpack with a lidar scanner on it, going to almost every substation they had in Spain and Italy doing lidar scans of the actual facilities. They were putting lidar devices on some of their trucks. And the idea was being that, well, hey, in five or 10 years time, lot of autonomous things driving around or delivery trucks or whatever. Well, if we can do a lidar scan of the street and compare that once a week, we can see if any pole has shifted or moved or vegetation encroachment. And their idea at the time was that, well, if we go off and do this ourselves to build a network digital twin, we're actually creating a digital twin of a lot of parts of a city or a country. And if we just do it for ourselves, that's going to be very expensive. So how do we do that with a government, with a city, with a somebody? So we might be looking at the pole, have the poles moved or the wires changed? Somebody else might be looking at, has the pavement cracked? It's back to the kind of the smart city combined model, right? Everybody wants a digital twin of the city, but they all want it for different reasons. They're all looking at different things. And I think one of the challenges going forward, you know, when the Internet of Things took off, everybody wanted to have their own Internet of Things platform, because everyone assumed that, well, if I have my platform, that's how I monetize everything and I'll make a killing. Everybody had their own IoT platform. There's been a big shake out of that in the last four or five years. Right now, if I look at an industrial digital twin, everybody's got their own different piece of software. I think that's going to have to change because everybody can't keep updating their own digital twin to the best of the thing. And whether that's I don't know, people start using Epic or Amazon, come up with something, or Microsoft Mesh or Omniverse, or someone's going to start putting a consolidation play in place and then you'll start getting, what would you say the 2101 equals 3. So I think that's where governments will go, well, if rather than everyone doing it themselves, can we have one digital twin model of our city and then everybody can use it for whatever they want. Then you start getting economies scale. But that's very hard to do, right? The amount of people that have to agree on that is horrendous, right?

Yeah, definitely. So how do you think that the Metaverse can have a positive impact on climate change?

So the name of the game right now in the energy industry is how do we reduce emissions? And obviously net zero is the current goal, not zero. So everyone's going, well, how do we reduce our emissions? The first thing is that, well, can you measure your emissions? And even with all of the sensors that are out there, a lot of that data is not being used. Like look at methane tracking, right? Did sensors exist, the satellites exist, people, the world could do a much better job of tracking, well who's actually or where is the methane coming from and how do we stop it? So I think that public data that's being made available will. People can't hide anymore. So it's not a bottoms up reporting and I'm saying I'm grand and we don't have any fugitive emissions. When I get a planet 24 hour report going well of methane coming from somewhere in your facility or around your facility or your pipeline or your oil field or whatever, or your landfill or your farm. So people can't hide anymore. So cut a long story short, again, the whole digital twins exist because they're seen as a way of a reducing cost, predictive maintenance and all this stuff. And if you can't measure it, well, I can't make it better. And the whole impact of climate change as well, how do I, how do I either produce energy more efficiently, how do I use it more efficiently, or how do I reduce the use of energy? So energy efficiency and whether that's in homes or not. And again, I think that's where digital twins AI. You know, if you look at the amount of smart meters out in the world, I got 200 million in Europe alone. When you actually dig into it, not all of that data is being used today. They're collecting it, but they're not using it. So because they haven't got around to it yet or whatever. They're using it for some things, so they need to get better at that and then they can start doing better der management and more people are plugging in electric vehicles. And how do I manage the grid? So the metaverse is just a new way of, you know, I said at the start, in my opinion, it's simply the next iteration of our a digital way of interacting with our physical world. So I think it'll help us to be able to visualize something rather than looking at a 2D map that's with a spreadsheet telling me where energy is being consumed or not or something.

Yeah, that makes total sense. So and then in the consumer metaverse, everyone talks about it has to be open, decentralized, no closed walled gardens. How do you think that should be in the enterprise Metaverse?

It will be walled gardens, if that's one word. Or at least it's like the blockchain debate, right? It will be permissioned and it will be. It's not going to be a complete free for all. You know, today, one of the things that you could say is holding back some of the adoption of Internet of Things and digital twins within the energy industry is the fear of cybersecurity attacks. And that's real, right? That there's a lot of bad people out there doing bad things every day to energy infrastructure. So when I was on intel, you know, five or six years ago, 10 years ago, we'd be talking about cloud and they were going cloud, we're never going to touch. That has to be on premises. Just not going to happen. And now you look at what aws, Microsoft, others are doing and almost every single oil and gas energy company is using the cloud for something. They may not have their critical control systems in a cloud, or if they do, the cloud has to be in that country in their facility. They're using the same technology. But you know, you see Amazon and Microsoft and Google and others announcing in country secure systems simply to meet local national security requirements, whether that's in the Gulf or in Europe or whatever. So it's not going to be an open world where everybody's going to have a free for all. A lot of this stuff will be seen as state security assets and there will be some sort of walled garden or whatever. Now that kind of in some ways defeats the purpose. But if you look at what's happening in blockchain in the energy industry, it's the exact same, right? It's all permissioned blockchains. It's not a complete Open source, open for everybody, decentralized model.

Yeah, I think it makes sense because just like you have private 5G networks, I can imagine that you have private 5G networks connected to a private enterprise metaverse for a company or a group of companies who want to exchange data for whatever reason. So I think it makes total sense.

Yeah. And you know, one of the, I suppose one of the selling points from the likes of Siemens and ABB and Schneider and everybody was just saying, well, if you connect up your wind turbine or your gas turbine or whatever of equipment, if we can collect data from the hundred transformers you have in your network, well, we can build up a AI model to go, well, what's good and what's bad, and we'll see when something's out of whack. But if we can combine that with the other 10,000 transformer data that we have at other customers, then we can actually do much better models. But then many utilities or oil and gas companies will say, well, yeah, well, we don't want to share our data with cloud because one of our competitors might see something and they might be able to infer production data coming out of the data, you know, based on, oh, we've shut down so many pumps or whatever, so they try and game all that out. So they were very reluctant to share data regardless of the cybersecurity. Well, if the data is going out, how do we make sure the bad guys don't get in? And there have been examples of, in oil and gas companies where bad guys did get in because they got in through a third party IoT monitoring system, you know.

Yeah, well, that's a nice bridge to the dark side. What kind of ethical challenges and dangers do you foresee for the metaverse, for the enterprise metaverse to happen?

The exact same as that we have today. Human nature hasn't changed in, whatever, 10,000 years. So as cool and as fascinating as the technology is and as robust as we build it and cyber security designed in, there's equally clever people or clever AIs out there that will find ways of doing bad things, either for whether it's ransomware, you know, just purely monetary criminal activity, whether it's doing bad things just for the sake of doing it or nation states doing it. And I do think that whether it's bias or a lot of the challenges we have today will just simply be replicated in the metaverse. In the last couple of years, we've had people using video conferencing in ways we've never even dreamed of. And you have People Zoom bombing and coming in, doing inappropriate things. You may be having your virtual Metaverse events next year. And how do you stop someone coming in and protesting? You know, we're going to have the exact same issues we have in the real world in the Metaverse.

Yeah, I'm afraid so, too.

So nature hasn't changed, and in some ways I hope it doesn't. But as I say, technology is the easy bit.

Yeah, absolutely. So, and how do you think that the future of the enterprise Metaverse will look like?

I'm not sure people will be calling it the Metaverse. I think there'll be a rash of different terms. Omniverse from Nvidia. I think a lot of them have gone down their digital twin type. I would just say branding. So we'd probably see that. I think that a lot of the functionality under the covers will start to come together. I do think whoever creates the industrial Metaverse platform, it's kind of like the industrial Internet of Things platform. Everyone had their own. Now there's a lot of consolidation. You know, GES predicts and stuff didn't work out so well. And I think whether it's, I don't know, Microsoft, Nvidia, Siemens and ABB A somebody, Alibaba, I don't know if someone can create the platform and then you have low code and no code, you know, you don't have to do it all yourself and you can put your digital twin Iiot data into it. And I don't see a lot of people doing industrial players creating their own VR or AR headsets that will have to come from the consumer world for want of a better thing. But like the way companies like Realwear are adopting AR headsets to be compliant for oil and gas infrastructure where you, you can't have anything that creates a spark, you will have people then adopting those technologies so that you can use them in places where there's very strict electrical requirements. So I think it's going to be, it's the next iteration of digital twin Internet of Things and primarily also driven by the future work. How do we collaborate in better ways than just a Zoom call? And that's where I think I'll hand it to Facebook in that what they're doing there is pretty clever. But then I'm not sure, you know, a lot of companies won't even use Zoom today for security reasons. So they use Microsoft Teams. So what? Microsoft with Mesh. And so I think Microsoft with Mesh have an interesting opportunity. But that's my own personal opinion.

Yes, I agree. I think Mesh is pretty interesting indeed. How do you think that the Metaverse will change the future of work? Because yes, we can have meetings in virtual reality or we can, you know, but that's just the obvious. There's some non obvious changes that you see happening.

So I've done a couple of, I did one or two with a couple of friends like say Horizon workrooms, whatever, just to try it out and the gimmick and people, whatever. If you look at what happened with Zoom calls in or whatever, Microsoft Teams or pick a video conference thing, I'm not sure the majority of enterprises are using all those technologies to the best of their ability today. Even on Zoom call polls and hands up and whatever. Right. And that's fairly basic in terms of just how do you use a new tool as opposed to we just turn on the camera and we sit there. You look at people using virtual collaboration tools, Miro and whatever. Some companies are very good at it. Some of them haven't even started so that the collaboration is simply you have a talking head in a video and yet others are off using a lot of other digital tools. But to be quite honest, that's a new way of working and that's a new work skill. So then you kind of flip forward and say, okay, so at the start of 2020, I started using Spaces, a VR environment where it turns your avatar into a virtual camera. It uses the tracking from whatever from their headset. So I was doing presentations in VR and broadcasting it into Zoom meetings and my avatar was on a stage, pretty cartoony and whatever. Spaces got bought by Apple in whatever June 2020. Haven't heard from them since. I know what Apple are up to, but I'm sure they're working on something. I probably spent a Good Men week of time over a couple of months kind of how do you interact in a virtual world and using whiteboards and choreographing things and whatever. So I do think there's a whole different way of working now. If I look at our daughters, what you know is 30, she works in a unicorn kind of thing. They use collaboration tools in a way that I'm kind of looking at it going, wow, didn't even know you could do that. But I'm a certain generation and I think most of the people in the industrial environment, a lot of them are my generation, but yet the new workforce are coming in and the new generations are coming in and they're going, well, we just have a quick poll or we use Miro or we, you know, pick a, pick some other. A Trello board or something. Yeah, I think that's changing. But VR is another step, if I may. It's a different way of interact, a whole different etiquette, different way of using tools. How do I write in the whiteboard? Oh, hang on a second. This is hard. So you'll almost have to have rollout. A whole lot of training for people to be able to use those tools as opposed to a mouse and a keyboard, if that makes sense. I'm rambling.

No, it makes total sense because it is a different way of working. So it is. Yeah. I remember people having started the computer having difficulty with mouse and everything, and I imagine having to have controllers and it's five different buttons on it. It's a different way of working.

If I may, I'll give you a stupid example. I'm here taking some notes. I have notebooks and I write it down on a pen. I digitize it afterwards by uploading or whatever. But I still have scribbles on a notebook. And people would say to me, well, you could type that in as you're talking. I could, but I don't. I could use. I have a vibe board, interactive whiteboard, so I could write on that while I'm talking and then it's all captured and I could share with you and whatever, but I don't know, I could. And yet I'd be seen as someone who kind of tries out new things. So you try and roll that out into a company with 100,000 employees who are busy doing their day job. That's a whole lot of training.

Yeah, definitely. Completely agree.

The realization that this boss has left and it's not coming back. So if you thought digital transformation was happening at a pace you didn't expect before, and it's. There's too much. Well, buckle up. You mentioned earlier, it's this convergence. We've been talking about the Perfect Storm and the IT Land for years, but there's just more and more, you know, 5G. Okay, 5G is still way out there. You mentioned earlier oil and gas companies. Many are starting to look at private LTE networks. But 5G is still a bit away, even though Huawei and others are pushing it. But suddenly you get good broadband in an oil refinery or in a. Whatever power plant. You get headsets that you can actually wear for a couple of hours. Battery life improves, cloud, you get into data. You're getting dynamic digital twins. I can't have you come fly over and help me trouble fix this thing. You need to do it remotely. How do I do that? What kind of technology do I have? So, to me, all the different building blocks of whatever the Metaverse turns out to be are being put in place and at different speeds in different companies. But it is happening. It is not something you can ignore. And if you think that, oh, well, we don't do that, whatever, my answer would be, well, look, you know, y' all told me that you would never use cloud, and now look what's going on. So please don't tell me you're never going to use the metaverse in 10 years time.

Yeah, well, that's. Thank you very much. That's a great, great final note to this conversation.

And that wraps up the conversation with Kevin o'. Donovan. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is how digital twins will define the enterprise metaverse, and that they are very important for organizations who want to digitally transform their business. I couldn't agree more, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss digital twins in depth and how they are tier one for the Metaverse. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the Metaverse.