What are digital twins? Simply put, digital twins are virtual representations of a person, object, or anything that exists in physical reality. Often incorporating artificial intelligence, these virtual representations allow for nearly limitless research and development, testing, and simulation at a fraction of the cost. 

In popular culture, the image of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark updating a virtual replica of his Iron Man suit on the fly evokes a vision of a sci-fi future.  This is a digital twin.  

We might not quite have the holographic table, but, 16 years since the release of the first Iron Man film, this futuristic digital twin technology is already being deployed in a variety of industries today. 

Racing Towards Innovation 

The world of motorsports, particularly Formula One (F1), is defined by the pursuit of peak performance, extracting every advantage possible from their engine to the aerodynamics of vehicle construction to even minimizing the use of paint on the car to optimize weight.  

With the implementation of a spending cap in 2021, F1 teams are now more reliant than ever on technology to balance costly advanced engineering needs and financial restrictions. Digital twins have emerged as a key solution as they create a virtual development environment without the costly process of physically testing the performance of your vehicles on the track.  

At CES 2024, Siemens showcased how their digital twin solutions play a vital role in the development of Oracle Red Bull Racing’s reigning world champion F1 car. Siemens software like NX CAD creates a digital twin of the Red Bull F1 car that supports the cyclical nature of car development by testing the virtual version of the Red Bull car ahead of a race, while analyzing and incorporating the data from the real car each race to improve over the course of the season.  

While the street circuits of Monaco and Las Vegas seem distant to the everyday driver, the digital twin technology powering F1 car development could have implications for the vehicle design we see in our daily lives in the future.  In fact, the innovations for F1 cars often fast track the advancements of the larger automotive industry. 

The (Virtual) Pulse of Health Research 

The health and life sciences sectors are also utilizing digital twin technology to research disease and pioneer new, complicated surgical techniques. 

Dassault Systemes is one such leader. While they had virtualized cars, factories and other objects, Dassault incorporated artificial intelligence into their simulation technology to allow for the virtualization of much more complex objects: the human heart and the human brain. 

At CES 2024, Dassault displayed their Living Heart and Living Brain technology, which generate virtual models that simulate the functions of each of these organs to reproduce conditions to support drug discovery, surgical practice, and other treatment outcome testing.  

The Living Heart technology has already proven lifesaving through its use with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital designing and testing a new surgical procedure with this technology to correct an issue of oxygen flowing from the heart into only one lung of a toddler, which saved their life. This procedure has since been performed hundreds more times. 

We can only expect the deployment of this technology to expand as Dassault looks to other organs like the liver and other digital twin innovators enter the life sciences and health spaces. 

Building Tomorrow 

The sheer scale of digital twin technology cannot be understated either. 

Singapore completed a digital twin of its entire country in 2022, which incorporates AI, lidar, 3D mapping, raw GIS and imagery data, and other metaverse technologies to allow the country to develop more resilient, sustainable, and smart infrastructure. This digital twin will be vital for simulating and developing solutions to the unique challenges the nation faces from rising sea levels and significant population density. 

And just last month, NVIDIA dedicated a significant portion of CEO Jensen Huang’s remarks on AI at their opening GTC 2024 keynote to unveil a digital twin of the entire Earth that uses generative AI to  conduct weather and climate change analysis in an effort to combat the $140B in economic losses due to extreme weather. 

Both examples underscore that digital twins can power breakthroughs in our bodies and the cars we drive, but also virtually and literally build a more advanced world around us. 

Innovation is both revolutionary and evolutionary; making revolutionary leaps and taking piecemeal iterative cycles, simultaneously. As AI, cloud computing, imaging, metaverse and other digital infrastructure technologies improve with each generations, digital twins will be poised to power the breakthroughs of tomorrow.