How Digital Twins Are Transforming Manufacturing, Medicine and More

A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. There are two versions of a BMW factory in the medieval town of Regensburg, Germany. One is a physical plant that cranks out hundreds of thousands of cars a year. The other is a virtual 3-D replica, accessed by screen or VR headset, in which every surface and every bit of machinery looks exactly the same as in real life.