Did you know that NASA pioneered Digital Twin technology in its space exploration missions in the 1970s? At that time, every spacecraft in space was precisely recreated in an earthly version for study and simulation purposes.

Today, Digital Twins are realistic virtual models of a device, system, process, or product used for development, testing, and validation purposes. Nowadays, VR and AR technologies make it much easier to test Digital Twins.

I find this topic very exciting, so I have decided to write about how Digital Twins can be even better utilised with AR and VR! There are many examples, but I will focus on the most critical industries:

Manufacturing

As mentioned, Digital Twins are used in aerospace to create design models showing how the finished product will function. They help discover the actual capabilities of the product, avoid future errors, test it properly, and implement customer-requested changes.

One of the main reasons I chose today’s topic was my friends’ objection that Digital Twins are only used in manufacturing. The following examples will convince you that this is not the case.

Healthcare, Retail, and Other Consumer-Oriented Industries

Companies that interact with customers use Digital Twins to optimise patient care and customer service. With Digital Twins, you can enhance the user experience by employing AR and VR focus groups to test how customers or patients experience a physical facility. Of course, you can also improve the layout and design of facilities and operational efficiency to optimise the patient or customer flow within a facility.

Supply Chain and Logistics

Here, it is possible to test the durability of packaging and packaging materials in advance, optimize routes and delivery processes, and improve the handover between different supply chain stages.

General Applications of Digital Twins, AR, and VR

Digital Twins of routers, servers, storage devices, and virtual machines can serve as a test environment to examine performance or security vulnerabilities. Before implementing a new automated process for operating system updates and patch management for infrastructure devices, it is best to test it first in the twin environment. This way, facility experts can detect and fix errors, among other things.

In my opinion, none of this would be possible without the benefits that VR and AR technologies bring to Digital Twinning processes.