Towards the Industrial Metaverse: Developing Expert-Driven Technology Roadmap - Supplementary Materials

The industrial metaverse integrates numerous emerging technologies to enable immersive, real-time synchronization between virtual and physical systems across the industrial value chain. While some enabling technologies and use cases are relatively mature, others remain nascent, and their convergence lacks a clear path to development. To address this gap, we developed an expert-driven technology roadmap grounded in 31 interviews with 29 domain experts across 25 organizations. The methodological rigor of our approach was ensured through a multi-stage roadmapping process, iterative refinement across two interview rounds, systematic thematic coding, and cross-validation of findings between participant groups. The resulting roadmap is structured across four layers, i.e., market, use cases, enabling technologies, and resources, and mapped over a 15-year horizon. We further translated these findings into a three-step implementation model and a synthesis of adoption challenges. We further derived actionable managerial recommendations and highlighted strategic tensions related to workforce roles, openness, system granularity, and sustainability. Overall, the findings provide an expert-grounded and practically actionable foundation for strategic planning, policy alignment, and future research on the industrial metaverse.

In this supplementary materials we present the complete expert-informed roadmap for the industrial metaverse, comprising four sub-roadmaps corresponding to the functional layers: (i) market (Fig. 1), (ii) use cases (Fig. 2), (iii) enabling technologies (Fig. 3), and (iv) resources (Fig. 4). Each sub-roadmap shows the supporting dimensions and captures the anticipated developments across five temporal horizons: present, short-term, mid-term, long-term, and the vision. Red circles mark developments identified as critical for the successful implementation of the industrial metaverse.