Phygital is just the latest in a series of buzzwords describing the meeting of the physical (offline) and digital (online) worlds. The physical world can include anything – a building, a vehicle, an animal, or even the way a crowd moves through an event or how traffic flows at an intersection.
When physical things have digital twins, the thing is in the real world and the twin is the digital data generated, which reflects the features of the thing identically, writes Onur Kasaba, the head of sales at Tele2 IoT.
This phygital meeting of the physical and digital worlds reflects a general shift in human consciousness, where people want to create a digital world that can be interacted with as if it’s physical. Today, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world where any physical object does not have a digital component in one way or another. And online environments, such as social networks and e- commerce, which currently only exist in digital form, will merge with physical objects not just as a supplement, but as an integral part of them. This is a marked change from when the digital revolution kicked off in the 1950s – back then it was all about the transformation of analogue and mechanical activities to digital activities.
IoT is the digitalisation catalyst, because in order to digitalise the physical world, you need to connect it. IoT builds a bridge between services and offerings, and seamlessly merges the physical and digital worlds. The integration of IoT sensors and devices leads to automation and the reduction of human intervention, and in the business world, they are becoming imperative. Digitalisation is data-driven, and billions of IoT devices and sensors generate the data that supports the convergence of the physical and the digital, while analytics take the data and turn it into usable insights and information, disrupting businesses and creating new markets.
Continue reading this article on Page 18 inside IoT Now Magazine Q4 2021
