The explosion of XR technology and apps in recent years means that there are many new terms gaining traction. It can be hard to keep up. One you may have heard of, maybe even find yourself in ARPost – is “digital twin”. But what exactly does that mean?

What is a digital twin?

A “digital twin” is a virtual version of something that also exists as a physical object. The name can even help us get the idea to some extent if we use it as an analogy, though it doesn’t always fit.

Just like human twins, digital twins can look like their physical counterparts, but the two can behave very differently. One of the great benefits of the digital version is that you can often do things or go places that the physical version can’t.

However, unlike human twins, digital twins do not necessarily appear at the same time and are not necessarily created by the same people. Who creates twins, when and how – it all depends on the purpose for which they are intended.

When the digital twin is older

Many digital twins predate their physical counterparts and come into the world largely as a byproduct. We are talking here about virtual design models. 3D software, such as a computer-aided design (CAD) program, is used to create a mockup intended for a physical end product. This is commonplace in the automotive industry.

What happens to the digital model? That depends on the company. It can be archived internally for reference and never seen again by anyone outside the company (or inside the company). Increasingly, however, these digital models are seeing new life in a number of exciting use cases in a process called “re-rendering.”

The digital model can be used internally to train engineers or develop new products. It can be optimized in a game engine for vendors to present in virtual showrooms. It can even be used in a video game. Increasingly, these models are also being auctioned off to car collectors like NFT for their digital collections.

When the physical twin is older

On the other hand, the digital twin may appear much later than the physical twin. This often happens when people create a 3D model from an object that already exists. As mentioned above, a digital model can do things and go places that a physical object could not.

One prominent example is “Memorial to a Marriage,” a three-ton marble sculpture in New York with a 3D scan that serves as the centerpiece of the LGBTQ+ VR Museum. The museum is full of virtual scans of historical objects, but none of them better illustrates how a well-used digital model can take the idea behind a physical object and make it more accessible.

So far, we’ve been talking about what digital twins look like. However, they do not need to resemble the physical version to qualify.

Do digital twins have bodies?

Enterprise applications use information from connected devices to create multifaceted, real-time reports on machines or entire physical environments. These Internet of Things (IoT) digital twins are a version of “computer models” that are more like data points in a spreadsheet than a virtual object.

These computer models don’t just work one way. Analysts can change parameters in the computer model to simulate what would happen to the machine or physical environment under different scenarios. This can optimize performance by helping mechanics understand efficiency or simulate disasters without putting real workers and infrastructure at risk.

These computer models are being visualized more and more. A Resonai demo at AWE showed how inputs from IoT devices can be incorporated into a digital model of an entire building. This helps to visualize how and where machines are affecting the environment, especially for people who are not adept at reading computer models of rows and columns.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be another example of digital twins that look nothing like a physical twin. NFTs are identifiers for specific items on a blockchain. So when we think of NFTs as digital art, the NFT represents digital art but it just looks like a sequence of alphanumeric characters. And there is no law that says an NFT has to represent digital art.

Say what you will about cryptocurrency scams and the price of JPEGs, the fact is that the blockchain itself is an incredibly safe and reliable way of organizing and protecting information. As a result, NFTs are increasingly being used as the 21st century version of certificates of authenticity, provenance of (physical) art, or even property titles.

In all of these cases, although the NFT still looks like a string of letters and numbers, it is standing in for a physical object. That makes it a kind of digital twin.

Do I have a twin?

What about digital twins of people? Honestly, it’s becoming a thing. Something like.

There are digital versions of a couple of people, mainly actors. These digital doppelgängers allow an actor to act alongside himself. They also allow actors to appear in movies after their deaths or to appear younger on screen.

Right now, these twins are just tremendously detailed manipulated 3D assets – they don’t think for themselves. But, the day may be coming. 2014 book by Dr. Martine Rothblatt virtually human explores the idea of ​​”mindclones”: AI versions of real people trained from things like the living person’s social media posts.

How could these cufflinks be used? Who knows.

We could study them to learn more about the human mind. We could also use them to “live forever” similar to Johnny Depp’s character in Transcendence – which also came out in 2014 (coincidence?). A mind clone could even be used to animate the kind of human digital twins we have, creating immortal incarnated avatars.

It’s interesting to think of technologists training their own mental clones while they’re alive to prepare for death, kind of like talking to your portrait in the Harry Potter universe. It’s definitely something that’s probably already happening.

More twins with XR

Like many tech terms, “digital twin” has been around for much longer than you might think, longer than the new hype generated by advances in virtual and augmented reality.

However, by expanding our ability to visualize data, XR is also revolutionizing how digital twins are used and the kinds of people who use them for what purposes.