Interest in digital twins has increased in the past year. Digital twin tools are growing in capabilities, performance and ease of use. They also use promising formats like USD and glTF to connect the dots between different tools and processes.
Advances in model combining techniques can also improve the accuracy and performance of hybrid digital twins. Generative AI techniques used for text and graphics can also help create 3D shapes and even digital twins. Advances like this allow enterprises to mix and match modeling capabilities in new ways and for new tasks.
Here are 10 trends to look out for in the coming year.
1. From linking files to linking data
In recent years, all major product and infrastructure design tools have moved to the cloud, but they still use legacy file formats to exchange data. Vendors are increasingly touting the data integration aspects of these tools that make it easier to share digital twins across tools and services.
This capability often starts as a subset of a vendor’s tools. For example, Siemens is rebranding a new subset of its tools as part of Siemens Xcelerator, while Bentley has launched phase 2 of the metaverse infrastructure. In November, Trimble launched the leader in location intelligence Trimble Onea “purpose-built, connected construction management offering that includes rich field data, estimating, detailing, project management, finance, and human capital management solutions.”
It’s one thing to simply move apps to the cloud. These innovators are doing something different: pioneering more efficient ways to connect data between these apps. In the coming year, the other major suppliers of construction and design tools are likely to announce similar developments for connecting digital twins and digital threads in different processes.
2. Entertainment companies focus on the industrial metaverse
Epic and Unreal have made significant progress by partnering with digital twin leaders to deliver a better user experience across devices. These companies have announced important partnerships with leaders in GIS, construction and automotive.
Blackshark AI developed the globe behind Microsoft’s latest flight simulator and continued to scale up the technology for automatically transforming raw satellite images into labeled digital twins. In April, Maxara leading provider of satellite imagery, has announced a significant investment in Blackshark for digital twins on Earth.
In the coming year, more gaming and entertainment companies will find opportunities in the industrial metaverse, which ABI expects will overshadow the consumer metaverse for years to come.
3. Nvidia boosts support for USD
Pixar pioneered the Universal Scene Description (USD) format to improve film production workflows. Nvidia has championed USD to connect the dots between various digital twins and industrial metaverse use cases. The company has built connectors to the IFC building standard and is improving workflows for Siemens in industrial automation and Bentley in construction.
USD still lacks physics, materials, and rigging support, but despite its limitations, there’s nothing better for organizing the 3D information for giant digital twins. Nvidia’s pioneering work on USD promises to integrate raw data into various workflows in industry, medicine and business.
4. glTF simplifies exchange of digital twins
There is growing momentum behind the glTF file format for exchanging 3D models between different tools. The Khronos group calls it the JPEG for the metaverse and digital twin. Expect gITF to pick up steam, especially as creators look for an easy way to share interactive 3D models across different tools.
5. Generative AI meets digital twins
Over the past year, the world has been amazed at how easy it is to use ChatGPT to write text and Stable Diffusion to create images. Meanwhile, others have demonstrated new multimodal tools, such as DeepMind’s Gato for harmonizing models across text, video, 3D, and robot instructions. In the coming year, we can expect more progress in connecting generative AI techniques with digital twin models to describe not only the shape of things, but also how they work.
Yashar Behzadi, CEO and founder of Synthesis AI, a provider of synthetic data tools, said: “This emerging capability will change the way games are built, visual effects are produced and immersive 3D environments are developed. For commercial use, democratizing this technology will create opportunities for digital twins and simulations to train complex computer vision systems, such as those in autonomous vehicles.
6. Hybrid Digital Twins
There are different performance, accuracy, and use-case trade-offs between the models used in digital twins. Prith Banerjee, CTO of Ansysbelieves that in 2023, enterprises will find new ways to combine different approaches to hybrid digital twins.
Hybrid digital twins make it easier for CIOs to understand the future of a given asset or system. They enable companies to merge asset data collected by IoT sensors with physics data to optimize system design, predictive maintenance and industrial asset management. Banerjee foresees that more and more industries will adopt this approach with disruptive business results in the coming years.
For example, a healthcare company could develop an electrophysiological simulation of a heartbeat as muscles contract, valves open, and blood flows between the heart chambers. The company can then take a patient’s MRI scan and develop a simulation of that specific person’s heart and how it would respond to the insertion of a particular pacemaker model. If successful, this R&D work could help medical device and equipment companies invent new products and apply for FDA studies by demonstrating in silico studies.
7. FDA modernization law replaces animals with silicon
Animal testing has been a requirement for all new drugs and treatments since the early days of the FDA. This year, the US Congress passed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, allowing pharmaceutical companies to replace animal testing with in vitro and in silico methods. This will drive innovation and commercialization of patient-on-a-chip and better medical digital twins for more cost-effective and humane testing.
Tamara Drake, director of research and regulatory policy at the Center for Responsible Sciencetold VentureBeat: “We believe that in-silico methods, including the use of artificial intelligence in combination with advanced organs-on-a-chip, or patient-on-a-chip, will be the biggest trend in drug development in the coming years.”
8. Digital twin ecosystems open up new use cases
Matt Barrington, emerging technology leader at EY America, predicts that digital twins will increasingly transform the way we run businesses in 2023. For example, using a digital market twin to evaluate new products will support management and strategic decision making. Digital twins will also support supply chain resilience in times of uncertainty and improve risk management, safety and sustainability.
This transformation requires more emphasis on fundamental digital capabilities in data management and data engineering devops, as well as a more comprehensive approach to security. Barrington predicts fragmentation and a high degree of specialization in the market, so that no single vendor has an end-to-end digital twin solution. Companies will need to integrate different capabilities to create the right solution for their business. Part of that approach requires more composable, open architectures and the ability to manage an ecosystem-based system.
9. Enterprise digital twins are taking off
Vendors have made significant advances in process mining and process capture tools to create a digital twin of the organization.
Bernd Gross, CTO at Software AGsaid these advancements allow companies to create simulations for an entire department or cluster of business processes rather than a single business process.
Leaders will find ways to integrate different technologies, such as process mining, risk analysis and compliance monitoring, to achieve more accurate results. These techniques require greater breadth and depth of data. Today, enterprises need to incorporate relevant KPIs, causalities between processes, business unit lifecycle, and more to create a truly accurate enterprise digital twin.
10. Digital twins power 5G
5G delivers significantly faster speeds in direct line of sight on one of the newer towers, but may be slower than 4G in the radio shadow zone. Cellular service providers are in a race to fill these shadows, and digital twins could help. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the 5G cell market could grow 54.4% per annum up to and including 2028.
Mike Flaxman, chief of spatial data science at Heavy AIsaid many telcos are looking at digital twins to switch to one plan, build and operate model enabling them to maximize service while reducing costs.
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