Players of a certain age will no doubt have fond memories of the paper instruction manuals that once came with every video game. Dan Marshall, creator of The Swindle and Lair of the Clockwork God, certainly does. He remembers the ritual of poring over the manual for a new game on the bus ride home from the shops, trying to absorb all of its information in preparation for playing the game itself. He vividly recalls receiving Bullfrog's 1993 game Syndicate via mail order early one morning, then impatiently waiting hours for his brother to wake up so he could play it on the PC in his room. "And for that solid time I did nothing but read the manual over and over and over again," Marshall says.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, says the company's next step is creating a'metaverse', artificially created environments where companies can simulate the future before acting on it. Mr Huang said the company wanted to "create the future" by creating a virtual world that is thousands of times larger than the physical world. This digital space would be recreations of New York City and Shanghai, Mr Huang predicts, with "digital twin[s]" of "every single factory and every single building". "Engineers and software programmers could simulate new software that will ultimately run in the physical version of the car, the physical version of the robot, the physical version of the airport, the physical version of the building", Mr Huang said in an interview with Time magazine. "All of the software that's going to be running in these physical things will be simulated in the digital twin first, and then it will be downloaded into the physical version".

It's not altogether surprising that a company earning billions of dollars a year making the chips that power today's hyperrealistic video games has a business plan inspired by a science-fiction novel. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the nation's most valuable semiconductor company, with a stock price of $645 a share and a market cap of $400 billion, is out to create the metaverse, what Huang describes "a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours." Huang credits author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, filled with collectives of shared 3-D spaces and virtually enhanced physical spaces that are extensions of the Internet, for conjuring the metaverse. This is already playing out with the massively popular online games like Fortnite and Minecraft, where users create richly imagined virtual worlds. Now the concept is being put to work by Nvidia and others.

Valve is launching a new Steam event tabletop gaming fans might love, especially now it's not wise to play in person with a bunch of people. The first ever Steam Digital Tabletop Fest, a joint project between Valve and Auroch Digital, centers around games that "run across the lines between digital and physical." By that, they mean its featured titles will include digital ports of physical games and digital games that have produced physical versions. They also include digital games that simulate the physical play experience and those that feature aesthetics inspired by tabletop games. Valve and Auroch are still in the midst of finalizing the panels and talks for the event, but they listed a few of their planned activities to give fans an idea of what they can expect.

With the rapid pace of technological growth, it's not always easy to imagine where digital transformation is taking the manufacturing sector, but one good way of doing this is to take a closer look at the "Digital Twin" concept within the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). As IoT connectivity provides the manufacturing sector with an increasing number of ways to access sensor-driven data locked in industrial machines and equipment, the need for data analysis, management, and control methods has also become more crucial. The amount of data collected from monitoring a smart factory is enormous, but if that data isn't aggregated and organized in a way that can support the decision-making process, then it's of no use. One method that's proving to be invaluable to engineering and customer service teams that are looking to leverage collected data is that of the "Digital Twin". Digital Twin is a virtual representation that matches the physical attributes of a "real world" factory, production line, product or component in real time, through the use of sensors, cameras, and other data collection techniques.