While BIM serves as the backbone of Digital Twin, Metaverse would be its redefined, immersive future. And together, they will transform the AEC sector
What seems wildly fantastical today, becomes a somber reality of tomorrow. This is how the trajectory of innovation has progressed, from the age of looms to mechanization, analog devices to digitalization, and towards era of information overload.
Digital Twin and Metaverse – powered by the convergence of all advanced technologies and premised on data-sharing and interoperability – would apparently be the grand culmination of this trend.
Universe in a Box
At the second exciting Day of GWF 2023 in Rotterdam, Alessandro Annoni, advisor, Digital Twin & Metaverse, Geospatial World, moderated the scintillating session on Digital Twin and Metaverse for the AEC industry. He narrated how the term Digital Twin was coined and its thrilling history.
It may seem surprising that the term ‘Digital Twin’ was first used in a prescient 1991 book ‘Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in A Shoebox’, written by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. The subtitle conjures up imagery of compartmentalization, miniaturization, encapsulation, and digital laconism, all of which embodies BIM, Digital Twin and its transformative energies.
Intricate details of complex mosaics and fine observation accorded by GIS, BIM and geospatial visualization gives a bird’s eye view in a granular manner.
This is the reason why countries from Tuvalu in Polynesia to Grenada in the Caribbean, and from Singapore to Greece, are racing to build a National Digital Twin – for better planning, decision-making, identifying gaps, and coming up with sustainable solutions to the key issues plaguing them.
From BIM to Digital Twin
Fast-forward 2023, and cutting the intriguing digression short, at GWF 2023, light is being shed on emerging use-cases of Digital Twins in the AEC sector and its immense utility across project lifecycle. AEC ( Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) hitherto has been seen an industry inertial to new innovations, and moving at a snail-pace in tech, as compared to other industries that have incorporated digitalization lock, stock, and barrel, reaping enormous dividends out of it.
“All around us digital technologies are emerging, and AEC is going through rapid digital transformation. Data is all around us, but still 95% of it remains unused. BIM is the enabler of Digital Transformation coupled with Cloud and collaboration”, says Eric DesRoche, Director, Infrastructure Business Strategy, AEC Design Solutions, Autodesk.
“BIM is the Backbone of Digital Transformation, and today it is very sequential, disjointed, and comes to a final end. So the BIM of tomorrow would be very much centered on data and collaborative platform environment”, he adds.
Collaborative Mechanism
Eric not only highlighted the intertwined nature of BIM and Digital Twin, with the former acting as its ‘backbone’, but took us on an enlightening tour of the progress in AEC vis-à-vis tech transformations over the years – from CAD to BIM to Digital Twin 2.0, with Metaverse being the next leap in the equation.
“Digital Twins and all of the AEC environments are a ‘system of systems’. You can’t build a system isolated from the local environment without understanding how it’s connected by roads, rail, waterways, and other utilities. Much of Digital Twins would be driven by technology convergence primarily between BIM and GIS. Digital Twins for AEC need to support analytical use-cases”, adds Eric.
Goes without saying that BIM and Digital Twins are increasing workflow efficiency, saving time, cutting costs, and leading to better returns on investments, but this is only the prelude. The full potential is yet to be harnessed, and insightful data and collaborative built environment holds the key to the future.
Immersive Visualization
What can’t be seen, can still be perceived intangibly. But what can’t be measured or monitored, amounts to a cipher, at least in real-world problem solving. This is the power of geospatial visualization that makes dark zones light up in the form of countless dazzling oblongs on a dashboard.
In the era of smart cities and automation, IoT and green transition, the need of this visualization is drastically increasing, becoming more pronounced in all aspects of daily life.
“We can visualize and analyze what has been captured, allowing our consumers to take data-backed decisions. With IoT and other myriad of sensors being exponentially placed everywhere, there’s a need of high accuracy layers and layers of information on exactly where they have been placed”, says Serge Lupas, CEO, Cyclomedia.
Luc De Heyn, Chief Commercial Officer, Merkator, says ‘For a Digital Twin, data needs to be complete, accurate, and up-to-date’. This statement can serve as a fitting coda to the power of real-time data and the mutual reinforcement and complementarity between geospatial visualization and BIM.
