According to the World Economic Forum, the global digital twin market is booming. Last year, it projected that the sector would be worth US$48.2 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 58 per cent. Another report, published by tech firm ABI Research, predicted that more than 500 cities worldwide would be using some kind of digital-twin technology by 2025 – in China, the number has already grown from two in 2018 to 72 in 2021.
The concept of digital twins first emerged in the automated-engineering industry. Manufacturers that created digital replicas of machine components could test them before making changes to the physical machines. Examples include Ford, which develops a digital twin for each model of vehicle it produces, and General Electric, whose digital wind farm is used to monitor more than 40,000 turbines across different sites. More recently, digital twins have come to have a much wider range of applications in many other industries, particularly urban planning. But when it comes to cities, Ralph Coleman, sales director at Bluesky, says there’s still a lot of uncertainty around what the term actually means.
Bluesky is a UK-based company specialising in aerial surveying. Its flagship product, MetroVista, is advertised as ‘the key to unlocking the smart city revolution’. So far, Bluesky has created 3D maps of 20 cities in the UK using a hybrid aerial camera fitted to a small aircraft. The camera is specifically developed to capture three geospatial datasets simultaneously: vertical and oblique aerial photography, similar to what you would expect to see on Google Earth, and high-density LiDAR imagery. LiDAR, Coleman explains, ‘works by firing millions of pulses of light out of a sensor and collecting them again’ to accurately measure the height of the terrain and objects on the ground, such as trees and buildings. ‘If you pull all those datasets together, you can create what is called a 3D-textured mesh – essentially a digital 3D model of an area,’ says Coleman, ‘and this begins to form the basis of a digital twin.’
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