The University of Houston is Immersing Itself in the Industrial Metaverse

From IIOT World

UH is part of a new partnership that’s working to advance innovations in the oil and gas industry’s industrial metaverse. Aside from UH, members of the partnership are the AI Innovation Consortium, tech giant NVIDIA, and energy engineering and services company TechnipFMC. Their aim is to create industrial metaverse applications in conjunction with the digital oilfield lab at UH’s College of Technology.

“We are currently working to build the world’s largest portfolio of digitized metaverse assets and environments for both the oilfield and specific manufacturing sectors,” says Konrad Konarski, chairman of the AI Innovation Consortium.

Aside from UH, members of the Louisville, Kentucky-based consortium include the University of Louisville, Pennsylvania State University, and Louisiana State University.

UH and the consortium opened the digital oilfield lab in 2020 at the university’s campus in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, where the consortium held an AI conference in August. One forecast indicates the global market for digital oilfield technology will grow from $24.3 billion in 2021 to $32 billion by 2026.

“Digitalization will be the backbone of the energy transition,” John Markus Lervik, co-founder and CEO of Cognite, which provides an industrial data operations platform, told Oilman Magazine. “Instant access to trustworthy contextualized data for better business decisions will transform the industry.”

That backbone appears to be getting stronger. According to data from the Pew Research Center, energy companies are reserving 18% of their digital investments for the metaverse.

Among the innovations coming from the UH lab are digital twins of oilfield assets and AI-enhanced computer images of pipelines. Organizers say metaverse tools developed at the lab will create extended reality (XR) environments for training, repair, and quality control.

“Our work with the AI Innovation Consortium and its ecosystem of partners and members is enabling the critical collaboration required between academic research, technology, and industry to scale artificial intelligence to achieve measurable outcomes in industries like energy and manufacturing,” says Marc Spieler, global energy director at NVIDIA.

Konarski says the new portfolio of industrial metaverse tools will enable a maintenance manager, a tech expert, or another professional to use a wearable computer or a smartphone, for instance, to connect the industrial metaverse with a real-world operating environment.

“In the metaverse, the AI technology invites an individual, anywhere, to put on a virtual reality headset and engage in an activity as if they were participating in the real world. Fixing a pipe, for instance, or identifying a problem in a valve,” David Crawley, a professor of practice at the UH College of Technology, says in an article published on the university’s website.