The Metaverse in Smart Industrial Environments: from Vision to Proof-of-Concept

As companies transit towards Industry 5.0, the convergence of physical and virtual worlds is unlocking new opportunities for efficiency and innovation. The Industrial Metaverse enables the creation of shared, immersive virtual environments where humans and robots interact with Digital Twins (DT) of physical systems and processes. Integrating real-time data with advanced visualization and simulation can improve industrial operations, collaboration, training, and decision-making. In this work, we introduce an original architecture that positions the Industrial Metaverse within the Cloud Continuum (CC) spectrum, highlighting how distributed computing resources, from the edge to the cloud, can support immersive industrial applications. Then, we present a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation of this architecture, leveraging state-of-the-art platforms such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, built on top of NVIDIA Omniverse, along-side real ROS-based robotic systems. Finally, we analyze key performance metrics and share practical insights gained from the deployment, exploring challenges and opportunities of integrating the metaverse concept into real-world industrial scenarios.