It sounds like something out of The Matrix: take all of the data available in a living, breathing, thriving metropolitan city and use it to make a “digital twin” that can be researched, analyzed and manipulated in real time by multiple stakeholders.
But that’s just what’s happening with Virtual Singapore, a new public-private partnership to take one of Asia’s most vibrant cities and recreate it as a dynamic 3D model. The idea is to collaborate on a data platform that will allow scientists, policy makers and even regular citizens to test concepts, conduct virtual brainstorming, and enable entities to solve emerging challenges.
The main driver of the project is the French multi-national software company Dassault Systémes, which is employing its 3DEXPERIENCE platform to power the dynamic and fluid scheme. In Singapore, the project is led by the National Research Foundation Singapore in concert with the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Digital Trends went to the experts at Dassault Systémes to find out more about this fascinating project.
Digitizing a city
“Indirectly, it started with the idea of digitizing a city,” said Ingeborg Rocker, the acclaimed Princeton-trained architect who was lured away to become Vice President of the 3D EXPERIENCity project. “We realized that there is a gap between the tools that are classically available for urban planning and design, and those we have at hand for other domains. What we started to do was to leverage the entirety of the portfolio of Dassault Systémes towards analyzing the capabilities of the city versus the needs of the city in order to expand how we think about digital transformation.”
It’s a model that organically lends itself to the Smart City movement , and it has wildly diverse applications, from capturing pedestrian movement throughout a city to visualizing evacuation routes during an emergency.
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Source: Digital Trends