It’s impossible to see the future, but modelling potential outcomes is powerful. Want to know how a driverless car will perform on a specific street in rare weather conditions, how an individual will react to a new drug or the impact of a larger train station on a city’s travel habits? You could wait and see – or you could ask a digital model to tell you.
Singapore is choosing the latter when it comes to everything from weather to 5G rollouts. The country is the first to edge towards that much-hyped concept of a digital twin, in which all of Singapore is represented digitally to act as a starting point for virtual modelling – and perhaps even a reality-based metaverse.
Before we find out how the island nation made a digital copy of itself, it’s worth taking a closer look at what we mean by digital twin. The idea comes from space engineering, with NASA attempting to test spacecraft designs in extreme situations before they hurtled off the planet. When it comes to product design, a digital twin can be a simple 3D virtual model of an object to better understand manufacturing,
