At some point or the other, a friend must have told you that he had met a person with a look similar to yours. Is he your twin brother? But imagine what if you can create your own twin? An exact copy of you. But who lives a digital life, not a biological one.
Actually, we are living in a world where everything present in the real world is being molded digitally. Our cities, cars, homes and even we ourselves exist digitally.
And just as there is a lot of talk about the Metaverse (a virtual, digital world where your avatar will be roaming), similarly digital twins have also become a new tech trend.
The digital twin will be an exact copy of the real world. But it will have a mission. It will improve the life of the real world or someone will give it feedback so that it can be improved.
Initially, such twins were just a collection of state-of-the-art 3D computer models. They had the Internet of Things (they use sensors to connect physical objects).
This means that you can digitally create something that is constantly learning from the original and also helping to improve it.
Technology analyst Rob Anderle believes that before the end of this decade, there will soon be a digital twin of humans that will be able to think.
He says, “But a lot of thought is needed before bringing these things to the fore. There will also be questions of ethics involved in this. For example, our digital twin capable of thinking can prove to be very useful for employers.”
Suppose your company creates your digital twin and says, “Listen, your digital twin exists. We don’t even have to pay it a salary. Then why should we employ you?” ”
Anderle says that in the coming era of Metaverse, the ownership of digital twins will become a big question. For example, on Meta (formerly Facebook)’s virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, you will be able to give your avatar your face but you will not be able to provide it with legs because the technology related to it is still in its initial stages.
Professor Sandra Wachter, Senior Research Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Oxford University, says about the growing interest in digital twins, “It reminds you of exciting science fiction. But right now it exists only at the level of imagination.”
She says, “Will someone succeed in law school? Will fall ill or commit a crime?” What will happen in someone’s life will depend on the nature of the people and their upbringing. This is a matter of debate.
How people’s lives will be will depend on their good and bad luck, friends, family, their socio-economic background, environment and their personal choices.
She says, “Artificial Intelligence is not yet mature enough to predict the events of people’s lives in advance. Because there are a lot of complexities involved in it.
That is why we still have a long way to go in creating digital twins. This is not possible until we understand people’s lives from beginning to end and make a model of it. In this too, we will have to guess what can happen in people’s personal lives.”
That is why the work of creating digital twins is being done the most and in the best way in product designing, distribution and urban planning. Take the case of Formula One racing for example. McLaren and Red Bull teams use digital twins of their racing cars.
The giant delivery company DHL is creating a digital map of its warehouses and supply chain so that it can improve its operations.
At present, our cities are rapidly changing into a digital world. Both Shanghai and Singapore cities have digital twins. They are designed to improve the design and operation of buildings, transport systems and streets.
In Singapore, one of the functions of digital twins is to help people make their way around polluted areas and change their paths. Elsewhere, the technology will be used to indicate new infrastructure such as underground lines. In countries across the Middle East, new cities are being built both in the real world and in the digital world.
French software company Dassault Systems says that there are thousands of companies that are showing interest in digital twin technology. This company is also working in this direction and through digital twin technology, it has helped a hair care company to digitally design a long-lasting shampoo bottle. No real prototypes were made for this. All the work was done digitally. This means that the raw material used in this experiment was saved.
This company is also helping other companies to design their futuristic projects. These include jetpacks to motorbikes with floating wheels. Help is being provided in preparing to make cars that can fly. Physical prototypes of everyone have also been made, but the initial models are being made in the digital space.
But the most importance of digital twins is being seen in the healthcare sector. Dassault’s Living Heart Project has created a very accurate virtual model of the human heart. It can be tested and analyzed. It also allows heart surgeons to experiment. Surgeons can imagine different scenarios and try out a variety of procedures using the medical device.
The project was conceived by Dr. Steve Levin. His reason for creating a digital twin was personal. His daughter had heart problems since birth. When she was in her late 20s and at risk of heart failure, he decided to create her heart virtually.
Boston Children’s Hospital is now using the technology to map the heart conditions of real heart patients, while a team of engineers at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London is working with clinical staff to develop a device that could help treat rare heart diseases in children.
Severine Trouille, director of global affairs at Dassault, says one advantage of experimenting with a digital heart is that it avoids experimenting on animals. The use of animals for scientific experiments has been a controversial aspect. Now the company is planning to create more organ twins. These include the human eye and brain.
She says, “At some point we will all have a digital twin so that when you go to the doctor, you can quickly create medicines to prevent disease. Also, we can ensure that every treatment is personalized.”
There is an even more ambitious project of this technology. Under this, it is being planned to create a digital version of the entire world. American software firm Nvidia runs a platform called Omniverse. It is designed to create virtual worlds and digital twins.
One of its most ambitious projects is to create a replica of the Earth in the digital world.
It is being called Earth-2. In this, deep learning models and neural networks will be used so that it can create an environment similar to the environment of the Earth in the digital space and provide a solution to the problem of climate change.
In March this year, the European Commission, along with the European Space Agency and some other organizations, announced that they would create a digital twin of the Earth. This was called Destination Earth.
These organizations hope that by the end of 2024, they will have enough data on the Earth’s real conditions and through simulations that they can create a digital twin that can focus on dealing with natural disasters like floods, droughts, heat waves and earthquakes. By predicting situations like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, those countries can be helped to deal with such problems which are constantly struggling with it.
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