DUBAI | Digital Twin
DUBAI | Digital Twin
Digital twins can help you make informed decisions and can be a valuable tool for predicting and mitigating potential issues of a site, district, city, or entire region. Digital twins, best described as a virtual representation of a place, can be used to test recommendations and evaluate scenarios, while reporting and monitoring data and performance.
Downtown Dubai
The digital twin of Downtown Dubai builds on the vision and direction the City is heading towards. Leaders in contemporary art, architecture, and design, the City is one of the most technically advanced cities of the world.
Downtown Dubai
Downtown Dubai, is a large-scale, mixed-use complex in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Dubai Downtown was created by the Emaar Properties. Before 2000, the place was called Umm Al Tarif.
It is home to some of the city's largest landmarks including Burj Khalifa, the Dubai Mall, and the Dubai Fountain.
It covers an area of 2 square kilometers (0.77 sq mi), at an estimated cost of US$20 billion upon completion and as of 2017, had a population of 13,201.
Modeling Downtown Dubai
The first step in creating a digital twin started with reviewing the spatial data. Data for the large-scale, mixed-use complex included building footprints, street networks, and street view imagery. Houseal Lavigne used ArcGIS Pro to review, enrich and clean up the data.
Procedural Modeling
Houseal Lavigne created a custom computer-generated architecture (CGA) rule to model Downtown Dubai in CityEngine. The rule allows the user to tweak over 10 different criteria with 35 parameters to model any building. Currently, there are over 130 billion iteration/buildings that can be built using the rule. Downtown Dubai was modeled to match buildings as seen in the City’s orthographic and street imagery.
Immersive Environment
Using Unreal Engine to build immersive environments and the metaverse app, Houseal Lavigne visualized and modeled developments to explore planning concepts. Leveraging Unreal Engine’s data streaming capabilities, the team successfully visualized real-time data and updates. The Dubai Metaverse app enables users to explore the digital twin, analyze different development scenarios as well as track building vacancies and identify available tenant space.
Planning
The Planning mode in the metaverse allows the users visualize different development scenarios in an immersive environment along with key indicators such as leasable square footage for retail, office, hotels, or the number of employees the development can accommodate. These indicators are custom-built to meet the client’s targets.
Real Estate
The Real Estate mode in the metaverse allows the user to track building’s vacancy status. The data is live-streamed into the app and allows the users in the immersive environment to see the changes. The metaverse leverages Unreal Engine’s (UE) HTTP request feature to connect with the client’s REST services to visualize data real-time.
Digital Twins and the Metaverse
Downtown Dubai's digital twin, facilitated by Esri technology and Unreal Engine 5.1, showcases the possibility of urban planning with modern technological advancements.
Dubai Metaverse Proof of Concept
Check-out the Digital Twin for City of Chicago here:
Downtown Chicago Digital Twin POC