Bentley Systems launches ‘phase 2’ of the infrastructure metaverse

Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software giant, launched phase 2 of the infrastructure metaverse at its Year in Infrastructure conference in London. This new phase includes many enhancements intended to bridge gaps between data processes in information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and engineering technology (ET). It also significantly improves the handoff across infrastructure projects’ design, construction and operation workflows. 
The essential vision is to help infrastructure companies evolve from using workflows built on documents and files to a more nimble, actionable and precise “data-centric” approach. This builds on Bentley’s years of experience with its iTwin platform, launched in 2018 with seven years of planning before that. 



Bentley CTO Keith Bentley stressed that these enhancements were designed to augment rather than replace existing tools. Engineers could continue to use their existing tools, workflows and processes and then bring in new digital twin capabilities as appropriate. The idea is to provide a path toward the future. 
Bentley has been instrumental in pioneering several infrastructure-related developments. One is a new data model for infrastructure digital twins. Another is a data schema for describing infrastructure. And a third is an approach to storing all digital twin data on top of an SQLite database. This differs from other cross-industry digital twin efforts like Nvidia’s Omniverse, built on the USD format. However, Bentley is committed to interoperability with Omniverse, gaming platforms like Epic Unreal and Unity, and industrial metaverse giants

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