Digital Twin

Description

By Gabriel Rene:

"In Web 3.0, we will not only create a “Digital Twin” or soft copy of our world and everything in it, but a Smart Twin of everything, with its own unique ID, interaction rules, and verifiable history capable of being linked and synced to its physical counterpart, spatially. Like a Wikipedia for anything, making all the world searchable, allowing for any object, person, process, and system to be updated, quantified, optimized and shared — if you have the right permissions to do so. The applications are endless and the implications, both positive and negative — practically indescribable. However, it is important that we begin to describe them; and accurately, at that, if we are to benefit from its promise and avoid its pitfalls, we must first name the thing correctly.

Plenty of Augmented Reality or AR-centric names for a Digital Twin of the physical world have been put forth by various industry leaders. Augmented World Expo’s founder Ori Inbar has suggested the term AR Cloud, a digital point cloud or mesh-like scaffolding of environments that allow us to project holograms into the world in ways that can be persistent and therefore experienced by multiple parties. Magic Leap has put forth the term Magicverse, a more playful version of a global digital twin that inspires visions of the fantastical. And in early 2019, acclaimed futurist Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame wrote an entire feature entitled Mirrorworld which attempted to consider a broader description that mentions IoT and other technologies in the Convergence but lacked a description of how these technologies would work together. Regardless of your preferred term, they are each meaningful attempts at the near impossible — describing an inevitable future world where the digital and the physical blend together, where the “world will be painted with data” as notable Forbes writer and industry XR veteran Charlie Fink is fond of saying.

What each of these terms lack is a clear vision for AR in the glaring light of the Convergence. How will this Digital Twin of the world combine with IoT, AI, and Blockchain to become a Smart Twin? How will AR work across various devices, operating systems, and locations? How will it work with other realities like Virtual Reality, the slower (projected adoption curve) but arguably larger cousin of AR? VR will play out its own exponential role — a 3D Virtual Reality internet of all connected VR spaces, games, and worlds classically referred to as the “Metaverse” in Neil Stephenson’s seminal sci-fi novel Snow Crash and more recently described in Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One as “The Oasis.” Whether we use these terms, the “Internet of Non-Things” or simply call it the “VR Cloud,” we cannot casually omit it from the Convergence, banish it to its own corner of the Spatial Computing universe apart from AR. This is why a more comprehensive term is required, one that encapsulates all of the technologies of the Web 3.0 era and even provides the ability for users and digital objects to move seamlessly between AR and VR spaces." (https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45?)