From 12-13 June 2023, DIDYMOS-XR presented an overview on the project and the current vision of use cases to be addressed at the FIWARE Summit.
In the beginning of June 2023, more than 420 people gathered for a three day event in Vienna. What a gorgeous environment – the FIWARE Global Summit this year was hosted in Vienna City Hall, constructed in the 19th century in an eclectic historicist style, called Ringstraßenstil. The event was organised by FIWARE, one of the DIDYMOS-XR partners. FIWARE defines and implements a curated framework of Open Source Platform components to accelerate the development of Smart Solutions in the Internet of Things realm (IoT) specifically also addressing Digital Twins.
But back to DIDYMOS-XR and its presence at the conference. Our coordinator, Georg Thallinger, gave an overview an the project: DIDYMOS-XR is about digital twins covering large regions and how to keep them synchronised to the real world. The aspect of keeping synchronised with the real world is twofold: on the one (and more intricate) hand – handling changes in respect to geometry (e.g.; newly constructed buildings or changed road layouts, adaptions to a production line or the warehouse layout), on the other hand, updates from sensors providing information on the environment.
We also presented the first results of the work carried out in the project on the definition of the use cases. The project plans to address the following use cases:
- Industrial environments: The digital twin will be used to generate up-to-date maps needed by autonomous mobile robots to navigate manufacturing environments.
For inhabited environments (from villages to cities) the following use cases have been defined:
- Virtual Tourism: The digital twin will be used in two ways; on the one side, before the visit so potential visitors could immersively experience the urban environment, even at different times of the year or during festive periods, and on the other hand during the visit, by means of an AR application which provides up to date information to make the stay a as smooth as possible.
- City Management: Information will be gathered throughout the environment on objects important to city management, such as traffic signs, benches, (bulky) waste, plants.
- City Planning: The digital twin will be used to visualise changes to the road layout or buildings in the city. Furthermore, it could be used to simulate the impact of changes to traffic signalling on traffic volumes, or the changing need fro parking spaces due to the future adoption of autonomous driving.
During the interesting discussion that followed, questions arose around how to handle the data volume of the digital twin for a large area (whereas the data volume for the initial digital twin is high, updates should not add considerably to the volume, as this is incorporated in the initial digital twin), and on how to make the update process as lightweight as possible (e.g. by relying on mobile or static sensors which are anyhow available in the environment) where addressed.
By Georg Thallinger
