Immortal Cities
Have you ever wish you could travel to the London or Paris of 1810? Or maybe to Alexandria of old? Or maybe to Singapore of 2075? Well, the good news is… you may soon sort of be able to.
You may or may not be familiar with the concept of digital twins. A digital twin is a virtual recreation of something that exists in the real world. Often used in architecture, it is now being applied to humans (for virtual pharmaceutical testing for example) and to cities. Imagine a perfect representation of you but digitally. Now imagine your city, but fully digital.
Although Google Earth recreates physical spaces digitally, a true (dynamic) digital twin captures the system’s behaviour and environment. The digital twin is updated with data to become a true live representation of the system. This allows us to use digital twins to examine the repercussions of certain changes, without necessarily having to face any real consequences. Makes sense?
Recently Aerometrex, a digital capture studio, created a digital twin for the city of Adelaide, Australia. Captured through photogrammetry and rendered with Twinmotion, it’s a highly detailed, dynamic capture of the city. Changes can then be made to the model (kind of like a real-life Sim City) to better understand the impact of certain changes before implementing them. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe Adelaide’s digital twin is a live-updated, dynamic twin. Nevertheless, it’s still an incredible feat of digital engineering!
What’s especially great about this project is that it offers the opportunity to immortalize or capture a city as it was at a certain moment in time. It may not seem like a big deal right now as we can simply visit those cities in person, but fast forward 30-50 years and I’m sure future generations would very much enjoy walking through the virtual streets of Toronto circa 2021. I sure know I can’t wait…
How might we design for digital travel?
In the future, will society be fragmented across a plurality of times - with some choosing to live in a London of the past and others in the present?
Oh - and as for traveling to the past (before this technology was available to capture the cities)? Well, those cities would have to be recreated out of speculation. I simply mentioned traveling to London or Paris of the 1800s as an example of what future generations may get to experience by visiting the cities of 2020 while in 2200.