Unveiling the Virtual Mirror: Exploring the Depths of Digital Twins
The relationship between the real world and the digital realm is becoming increasingly symbiotic and is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Although many of us are familiar with current digital communication technology and social media, recent advancements in artificial intelligence suggest that entirely new methods of synthesizing data and engaging with digital environments are on the horizon.
Matthew Ball outlines this relationship between data and the digital in his book The Metaverse. For Ball, data describes the attributes of a virtual object, such as its dimension or color. For a computer's central processing unit (CPU) to handle the data of a tree and its rendering to be done by a graphics processing unit (GPU), the data must be processed using a specific code. Additionally, if we intend to cut down the tree and use its wood to build a bed, that code must be integrated into a larger framework that governs the virtual world. If we aim to create a virtual representation of our world, recent advancements in AI, IoT, and VR are crucial for executing these processes on a large scale and for interacting with the data.
For instance, imagine a city official who can open a digital map that tracks pedestrian and car traffic, weather, metro status, and other metrics in real-time. This official could also check the status of water quality, the occupancy of a concert venue, or the number of vacant units in a building to accurately make decisions that would affect the city's stability in real-time. This is an example of a smart city, an advanced version of what's known as a “digital twin,” a virtual model of a real-world object. In Europe alone, there are nearly 170 smart city initiatives.
Beyond a simple simulation, a digital twin reflects data in real-time from the real-world asset to the digital twin.
As a replication of a real-world asset in the digital world, digital twins can range from digitally replicating a product and its life cycle – from concept design to production and then finally to service and maintenance, as well as a replication of a manufacturing facility or supply chain. They can add value by speeding up product development by creating prototypes and improving them more quickly. By 2028, the worldwide market for digital twins platform will reach $86 billion.
Nvidia has developed a synthetic data generation engine called the Omniverse Replicator to help develop digital twins. Two of the twins their engine has helped create are in the field of autonomous vehicles and robots, which can apply their skills to the virtual world before they are implemented in the real one. Furthermore, as companies adopt digital twins, Nvidia’s Fleet Command platform uses AI to allow the management and updates of the thousands of digital machines to reflect in the real world.
Other applications include Siemens, which is developing digital twins to support the maintenance of power plants. They estimate that they will be able to reduce downtime and help save utility providers nearly $1.7 billion per year with the technology.
BizzTech empowers digital twins by leveraging its advanced metaverse platform to create highly immersive and interactive virtual replicas of physical infrastructure.
These digital twins are not just static models; they are dynamic, data-rich environments that integrate real-time data from various IoT devices, sensors, and other data sources. This allows for a continuous and accurate reflection of the physical world within a digital space, enabling stakeholders to monitor, analyze, and optimize infrastructure performance in real-time.
Indeed, in one survey, 75 percent of product development executives said further digitization was a top priority for them. If digital twins are a certainty in the future, the question is to what extent they will interact with our lives. With the recent advances in AI, IoT, and VR, we are just beginning to uncover the extensive value these technologies will unlock.
References:
[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digital-twin-market-size-worth-86-09-billion-by-2028--cagr-42-7-grand-view-research-inc-301293274.html [3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/he-coined-the-term-metaverse-now-neal-stephenson-wants-to-make-something-of-it/
Comentários