Can the Industrial Metaverse, XR Build Future Smart Cities?

After the conclusion of the Creativity Conference, many experts from across the immersive technology landscape have continued to share their insights on the future of the industrial metaverse.

Amid the rise of emerging technologies, many companies have turned to virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) solutions to initiate next-generational city planning.

To discuss this further, XR Today is honoured to interview Paul Doherty, President and Chief Executive, The Digit Group, following the event.

Doherty is a veteran in the extended reality (XR) and building information modelling (BIM) industry, with decades of experience working with industrial metaverse technologies across the private and public sectors.

The Digit Group, a New York City-based firm, has developed smart city planning solutions and technological integrations, leading to the development of massive infrastructure projects like Saudi Arabia’s NEOM megacity.

Additionally, it works with the United Kingdom’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) to advise Westminster on its smart city development. Furthermore, the United States Department of Commerce selected the firm to represent the country in trade delegations. It has assisted both former US President Barack Obama’s missions to China and the Middle East in 2015 and former US President Donald Trump’s mission to China in 2017.

Hosted by Conference Director Maxim Jago, the Creativity Conference took place online 3 to 5 October. It showcased dozens of speakers and major global enterprises across industry verticals in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), extended reality (XR) and technology, film and media production, and many others.

XR Today: What can you tell us about the role of immersive technologies in the development of the BIM industry?

Paul Doherty: I’m still learning about this level of experience or level of engagement that we’re involved with in my industry, which is that we have this equal level of detail for our models.

You don’t want a photorealistic model if you’re trying to explain something to a person who is a painter or a plumber. You’re trying to build a physical asset out there and a building that people have populated.

That’s the goal of this communications medium, which is a digital medium. How do we get around to understanding how to interface with this thing, and what level of detail do we need so that it’s not too abstract, but people can get their work done?

We’ve now pulled that back because that’s the way that BIM was put together. It was called ‘level of detail’ because we knew there were going to be different audiences for that same model. We’re now in the immersive world, which involves things like augmented reality (AR), the more immersive virtual reality (VR), and all these different ways of explaining what you’re looking at.

What we’re also creating is a responsible illusion of what’s in reality, and what’s really cool about what that means is that, when you’re using [it], we’re no longer using things like a mouse or a keyboard, but we’re using our avatars.

My mom [who recently experimented with the Meta Quest 2] started to understand this because she was in the form of an avatar in this app, looking at her hometown of Ireland while sitting here in Memphis, Tennessee.

It was like the light bulb went off. That’s the type of moment where the technology becomes transparent to the experience—and that’s what is beautiful.

XR Today: How have you applied creative approaches to developing smart cities?

Paul Doherty: What we’re finding, especially in the BIM environment, is that we can now start to implement it as a design tool that crosses both that cyber-physical relationship where it’s not just a grand illusion, it’s actually a functional part of a process of a functional part of a workflow.

For instance, the world’s largest smart city project—in Saudi Arabia—is called NEOM. We’re part of it and were asked to create a healthcare system for this brand-new province inside Saudi Arabia. There’s nothing there, and they had nothing to create the health care system.

We were asked to create a hub-and-spoke system, just like we have here in the United States or Australia. This is where we have a general hospital, then around that geographically, medical centres. They then all feed into the hub-and-spoke and, if you’re really sick, you go to the hospital.

However, we thought differently and said, “No, let’s start getting down to the human-centric part about this,” because that’s where the creativity comes in relation to the world of XR. When we started taking a human-centric approach, we hired one of the world’s foremost cultural anthropologists and started understanding the constraints.

However, what would happen if we spent more money, time, or tools on healthy people, rather than everything on sick people? You can have recovery rates that are faster, so that you’re not putting as much strain on the system, and don’t need as many beds. All of that saves money and time, and is more efficient for that individual.

Instead of the hub being a general hospital, what would happen if that individual person, that citizen, or traveller was, to me, the centre point? They are the hub, and there are medical services that help them.

What would happen if we even went one step further, in that everything that we designed, we’re going to put 10,000 steps in place for you every day, and you don’t know if you feel it, but you can see it on your Fitbit?

The bottom line is when you walk from where you live to where you can get mass transportation to work, shopping, or the restaurant, we’re building into 10,000 steps. That’s the way that you start to create transformation and where people start to become healthier.

XR Today: What is the role of creativity in the XR industry?

Paul Doherty: At the end of the day, when you start talking about XR, there are going to be certain points that trigger your own story, because every person’s life is different. Every person has their own chapters to create their own narratives, their own way of understanding as to how they can live, inspired.

How do we start to live in this world that has great energy and creates an environment that can be nurturing? That is not creating a utopia. It instead brings in XR that starts to fill in parts of people’s lives where you know. I would be worried if the future turned out like Blade Runner, or if we’re immersed in the Ready Player One world.

It may sound pretty cool, but all the characters wanted to do was escape the ‘reality of reality’. The idea is to augment experiences and allow the digital world to start supporting what you need in the physical world so that they work in conjunction with each other. That’s the way that we’re starting to look at XR on a massive scale.

We’re doing this so much that the term the industrial metaverse is real. Our discussions with the higher leadership at Meta show they are fully committed to this. They’re like, “We understand.”

This is because when you start to take a look at how the digital realm has always worked, there’s always the fun social world, and then there’s the business world.

Think of AOL and CompuServe. Fast forward to Web2, we have Facebook and LinkedIn. They’re going to meld those two things together so that there’s a live work, play, and learning environment.

We’re not designing it for people like us. We’re designing it for my kids and their generations to come.

I always make sure that my 12-year-old son comes in, who’s a genius. He started with Minecraft, which is straight creative, and then went into Roblox to learn how to make your own games. Now, he’s an aficionado of Fortnite.

That’s the pecking order of this generation—he’s in his PhD world in Fortnite right now. When I take a look at how they interface, kids don’t see any difference between the digital and physical worlds. They’re having their childhood. It’s just that they’re in two different realms of how to communicate, and I’m fascinated by that.

XR Today: How do you see emerging technologies like the industrial Metaverse, digital twins, BIM and others converging 50 years from now, according to your vision?

Paul Doherty: To understand where the growth of technology and how that affected my career started when I went to school. It was when I was at an architecture school in New York City.

It was a great place to be an architect, especially as a student, and I had the choice of taking some time off from school and then working—work study. I took the program but didn’t want to work at a traditional architectural engineering firm because I’d be doing bathroom details for three years.

I joined IBM and their headquarters, just north of New York City, and I was the guy who figured out how to showcase all of their hardware best because they were the computer kings back in the 80s. For software, they were working with startup companies like Microsoft and Adobe.

At the end of the day, I was the guy who designed all the tradeshow booths for Comdex, PC Expo, and others. I had to learn how networks worked. I’m an architect and build buildings, but I noticed that the world of hardware and software were very similar in the process of constructing a building.

Sneak Preview of the Elevated Business Podcast, “Unlocking the Metaverse” originally recorded 6 October 2023 during The Creativity Conference. https://t.co/rwoQbvuJ2k pic.twitter.com/v5nO5Jvm5f

— ElevatedBizPodcast (@BizElevated) October 10, 2023

You needed to have a foundation. You needed to have a core and shell. It was the same thing with tech. I’ve always been thinking through, wanting to visualise and deliver a world where the building is a computer.

Connecting the buildings together creates the internet of buildings for a safer, healthier, and more interactive, entertaining world. With that in mind, we started to take a look at moving from drawings to a 2D computer-aided design (CAD) with an electronic pencil.

We had to redo certain things, but what saved us was not so much the initial drawing of drawings; it was making changes, because everything always changes due to field conditions.

When we started going into [BIM], we started seeing that this was the idea of just 3D CAD, except we realised that it could host data inside a 3D vessel to communicate better.

Fast forward to now, and we can put that same 3D model onto a gaming engine to further explore or better explain to people building, running, or inhabiting the building. All of a sudden, we have a different way of looking at things.

However, what we’re very cognizant of, and where we’ve failed as a profession, industry, and society, is that, even if you were lucky enough to be able to spend $3,000 on a piece of software, what happens to everyone else? What about those kids that were really talented, but didn’t have the money, and they couldn’t become an architect?

One of my passions is to democratize almost everything to do with [emerging technologies], but should it be limited to a socioeconomic class that, because you can’t find the $350 actually to get a Quest headset, you can never experience that immersive part of XR. One of the things that we do is that.

Every time we design a virtual world, we are able to set these things up as part of our business plan. When we get involved with billion-dollar projects, this means our construction loans are very expensive.

This also indicates that I can use the digital assets that we need to build these buildings, theme parks, and cities, post them online, and create a revenue-generating amusement park in Qingdao, China.

What’s coming up, right under the ground, is a virtual reality theme park that we designed, which will open virtually a year before it physically opens. We’re talking Tencent, Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, and others because they’re going to be the tenants here. We’re promising that revenues will come your way once we go live on our line because people will be astonished at the theme park.

Even better, we’re estimating that we’re going to be lowering our construction loan by 8 percent on a $1.7 million project. That’s real money and a real use of XR in that it becomes not just a tool, but a business plan.

The way that we’re doing this, and the way that we designed it, is via the smartphone and tablet. Most of the world can afford that. To put it this way, we’re trying to get it down to everyone affording things like that, but for the most part, you can actually start to access these types of ways of communication.

The next wave would be access to XR through a browser on laptops and other devices, but the ultimate way of having that level of experience is actually going through a head-mounted display, smart glasses, or whatever they’re going to come up with next, like neural networks.

These are ways of lowering the barriers to entry for digital transformation so that the promise of everything that you publish in the community that you have allows us to actually apply them. We’re giving them the opportunity to use the tools and to start to look at data differently.

When you start to really take a look at what things like blockchain can do, it directly affects XR. Think of XR as a body, right, but you need certain systems in place. You need your circulatory, digestive, and pulmonary systems—all these things have to be in place.

We’re watching these next generations using things like blockchain, smart contracts, and now, with the maturity factor of machine learning (ML), becoming large language modelling (LLM) in artificial intelligence (AI).

Some fun things are happening out there, and I can see this question about AI and how it interfaces into this new medium of the Metaverse and XR, and according to my perspective, many are afraid that AI taking their jobs.

That will never, ever happen. A person using AI will absolutely take your job—It’s just another tool. We’re in a fascinating place right now, and 50 years from now, there will be more people in cities.

Unfortunately, certain cities have certain policies that are rolling things back to the point where we have homelessness and immigration problems.

We have stress on services of infrastructure—everything from water to power to transportation—that will create slums. I don’t think anyone wants to live in the world of Star Wars’ Tatooine.

We don’t want that and do not want to create this dystopian future that Hollywood thinks the future is about. Using this new medium, we can provide positive tools and start the storytelling process so that we can live in a civilised society that promotes from within [and] have the business community start to realise that it’s about love.

The word most people automatically think of is romance, but that’s not quite true. It’s that everything is connected to everything.

In 50 years, I do not have a vision of what that looks like, but I have a very good vision of how we can actually start to build environments to allow humans to be humans, and let that be their next world.