Can Investors find Value Incentives in Digital Twin Technology?

CEO and President of Orlando Economic Partnership, Tim Giuliani, explores immersive tech for local business engagement

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Can Investors find Value Incentives in Digital Twin Technology?
Mixed RealityLatest News

Published: March 20, 2023

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Rory Greener

Late last year, the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP) teamed up with real-time 3D (RT3D) engine providers Unity to design a digital twin of the Florida area to drive local business investments and technology innovations.

The OEP digital twin recreates roughly 800 square miles of Orlando as a 3D render using integrated technology such as photogrammetry, AI, drones, and mixed reality (MR) curved displays, which negate headset usage at the firm’s Florida headquarters  – also known as the Metacentre.

The OEP digital twin is in its early stages. The initial stage looks to attract stakeholders and investors with an engaging wow factor to fuel local developments such as transport, climate change, and utilities.

OEP’s solution also leverages real-time data to reflect city-wide changes and developments.

The CEO and President of Orlando Economic Partnership, Tim Giuliani, sat down with XR Today to discuss the firm’s digital twin and how it brings investment incentives to the region.

Why Develop a Digital Twin of Orlando?

According to Tim Giuliani, one of the OEP’s primary missions is to attract businesses and business investments into the Orlando Region. The project also allows the OEP to leverage the area’s rich history of technology innovation and local economic development through its vital tourism sectors, science culture surrounding NASA, and the area’s higher education/university communities.

Giuliani noted:

So we partnered with Unity over the last year to develop a digital twin that allows us, at a phase one level, to bring potential business investors into the market and to give them a high-level Geographic overview of Central Florida.

It’s a very big area. There are 800 square miles in our digital twin, so instead of driving an investor everywhere [in Florida], we now have a tool to geographically Orient them. We can get down into the parking lot of buildings they may be considering and overlay all of our data to make it much a much more visual experience.

During the exclusive interview, Giuliani explained how the OEP uses its digital twin technology when a company considers investment into a suitable southeastern US district city/region.

When scouting suitable locations for establishing enterprise operations, a stakeholder may go to three or four cities. When Orlando is on that list, the OEP can bring an investor into the twin and relay city-wide immersive infographics via the sophisticated simulation experience.

Giuliani explained:

We wanted to demonstrate that we have the largest modelling and simulation cluster in the world. Most people think Orlando and they think Disney, Universal, and they’ve been here for a vacation. What they may not understand is that this is where the space race was built out of in the US. So we have a lot of technology here and we’re able to put a lot of that on demonstration through our digital twins, since it was largely built here in Orlando.

There’s endless opportunities. There was enough support for an investment in a digital twin for marketing purposes and the geographical orientation we use it for now. There’s a lot of value in creating that wow factor for investors and companies looking at Orlando. But that’s just the beginning of where we plan to go with the digital twin.

Can Investors find Value Incentives in Digital Twin Technology?

Giuliani noted that the OEP is looking for that “wow” factor. According to CEO and President, digital twin technology allows the OEP to present a version of the Florida region that makes investors realise there is more to Orlando than theme parks and tourism. 

Giuliani said:

We were looking for something that was a wow factor, something that made people realise, oh, Orlando’s a lot more than theme parks and tourism and it clearly does that, even at this phase one stage we have a 180 degree LED wall as four-to-ceiling screens. We’ve also got 4K screens on the floor and translucent panels to give it a 3D perspective.

OEP leverages its Metacentre headquarters to create a space allowing investors to experience an immersive informational presentation which is “more exciting than sitting through 75 Powerpoint slides.”

Giuliani explained:

It’s a conversation. People are standing around. They don’t have headsets on. They’re able to engage in a conversation, walk around, it’s a much more engaging conversation than it used to be.

OEP Roadmap, Growth from Phase One Onwards 

The initial Metacentre marketing focus of the OEP’s phase one period is to grow the project forward as a tool for local prosperity. Although, a hurdle the OEP must overcome before entering phase two of its roadmap is introducing MR technology to investors unfamiliar with immersive solutions.

Giuliani added:

We realised because the technology is so new, we had to have people come in and see it to understand it. Once they see it and they can wrap their head around it, then they can envision “this is how we plug in transit data”, for instance. “This is how we plug in utility data, and what if we electrified the bus fleets? What would that do? What would be the Impacts on our energy grid, and where would we need to make investments if we put a new train station in here, how is that going to impact traffic and local connectivity?”

So we’re just now having those conversations and bringing people into the marketing centre to understand how they might be able to help us co-develop phase two and phase three so that we could bring in a variety of stakeholders to take this digital twin from a marketing centre into a working, real time digital twin.

Moreover, the OEP CEO and President noted that his firm needed to create something that stakeholders could visit to assist in person to help with developing the project roadmap. The OEP digital twin is still in its foundational stages. Still, to advance the project’s value proposition, the OEP is devising ways to engage interest with various investors to build a deep, immersive solution to benefit the region.

Giuliani explains that his team could not have “built the whole mansion at one time it, it would never have been finished,” adding that the OEP laid the foundation for the digital twin’s real-world usage and now the OEP is “looking for partners.” 

Defined by the Sum of its Parts. What Integrated Tech is Fueling the Project? 

Like many emerging tech projects, XR solutions need a deep technology stack to succeed. For example, smart glasses manufacturers and Metaverse service providers are leveraging cloud-based RT3D data streaming solutions to secure seamless connectivity to immersive features without being hampered by local computing restraints.

Giuliani explained that the OEP digital twin solution leverages Unity’s gaming platform and RT3D engine as part of its technology stack, therefore increasing usability.

Unity’s RT3D platform also allows the OEP to place information and graphics over the digital twin, MR-powered stakeholder presentation. The OEP team can put “any chart, graph, video, image” over a digital twin representation of an Orlando point of interest.

So it becomes a dynamic presentation instead of just looking at the geography, you’ve got 80 data sources. There’s public, there’s private, there’s proprietary, there’s all these different data points that we could lay over the top of the geography. You can see available buildings, you can see per capita income down to the neighbourhood level, and you can see educational attainment levels. You see the region come to life.

Digital Twin Usability and Presentation

Giuliani said, “the thing maybe we were most concerned about is once we had this sort of fancy tool would it be easy to use.”

Although, the CEO and President explained that thanks to the digital twin solution running on a tablet and familiar gaming/RT3D engine, “it’s no more complicated than playing a video game.”

But with new technology comes new challenges to solve, Giuliani explains:

It’s not the easiest thing to run through the presentation on the tablet and speak at the same time. We typically team people up so that there’s more than one person orchestrating the presentation, which does help with the flow. But again anyone that spends 30/45 minutes getting up to speed on it can immediately start to play or use the digital twin.

Moreover, the OEP recognises the local talent and resources available, which can help drive the digital twin project forward. Florida and Orlando is a talent pool for integrated technologies like 3D reconstruction, game development, modelling, and simulation – all of those components are already a stronghold here [in Orlando], added Giuliani.

Giuliani also noted that certain local technology talent pools “used to look like different sectors or different silos.” Although the rise of immersive technology like OEP’s digital twin, XR tools, and broader Metaverse solutions allow “these different sectors to work together to create, however, you want to define, the Metaverse.”

In closing, Giuliani added:

So the, all the branches of the US military have procurement offices here. There’s over $6 billion that flow through those offices every year, largely to local companies dealing with modelling and simulation and this digital twin project. The Metaverse, is the next generation of that technology. So that’s why Orlando is being called the Metacentre; this is the place where all those technologies already exist.

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