Digital Twins, a breakthrough in 2023 and a new era.
Yearly digital trends study of innovation specialist Space and Lemon Innovations. 8th edition.
Once a year, we at Space and Lemon Innovations, invest resources for a yearly digital trend study. An exciting moment in our research routine. Stop, project ourselves in the year ahead and select a topic, a focus that can last for 12 months. A difficult choice in December 2022 when ChatGTP was invading our sphere and our enthusiasm. But we stuck to the first choice, digital twins. A transformative trend with a vast intersection to Metaverse.
The end of the Digital Transformation is near.
Digital Twin is the solution. 2023 is a year of business tensions with slowing of economy and inflation. Businesses are under pressure to perform under those circumstances. Remember the Sept. 2022 Microsoft slogan at Ignite 2022 by Satya Nadella “Doing more, with less”, introducing how the newest cloud solutions will contribute. Microsoft themselves present their own Azure Digital Twin solution. But it is more than just economics. The time of just doing digital transformation is over. Digital transformation era with education and a plain focus on developing digital properties like apps, e-commerce and productivity tools. We come into an era of more concrete digital solutions, massively based on data, with a blunt economic contribution. Digital twins are the most exciting one, with a promise of lower costs and higher engagements.
Digital Twins beyond the prototyping use case.
A digital twin is a digital reproduction of persons, game characters, living rooms, cars, motors, buildings, factories. Physical objects — a well-known use case in the manufacturing industry with a digital reproduction of a motor, a brake, a car body. It allows for real time, data-driven, 2D/3D simulations and the ability to build a digital prototype. Reproduction of objects, a well-known use case in gaming with a new generation growing in these worlds of three dimensions and simulations. Reproduction of objects, a well-known use case in try-ons for glasses, lip-sticks and furniture in a room.
In fact, today, the concept of a “Digital Twin” is stretched to reproducing an abstract system — an ad campaign, a product launch, a consumer habit, any process. This is the exciting part. A new dynamic. Why not reproduce a consumer with all historical data and results, and run simulations? A consumer avatar. First research and papers have been published in the US under the “Digital Twin of a Customer” label.
The avatar case.
An avatar is a digital twin. A digital twin of oneself and a use case of its own. A major habit of consumers of games where the whole thing stems from anyway. Today we have all the tools to build an avatar, all tech giants with their own avatar builders. A sign, Google recently acquired an avatar tool builder for $100 millions. Now, every platform has an avatar builder. Literally a-digital-twin to use in games, in social media. A cloning of oneself, body and voice, a weather speaker can go on holiday and still read the weather bulletins with his own cloned voice, IP-protected of course. An avatar is also a mask, a protection to the drawbacks of stereotypes in a society and in digital worlds where every judgment is public. A strong trend in Asian society, in China in particular. By the way, an avatar is a consumer of its own and can buy virtual goods, a new market. “An avatar is a part of me and of my social presence” always says a 21 year old young professional at Space and Lemon Innovations.
Breakthrough of tools.
There is little obstacle to building a digital twin with all types of ready-to-use platforms. First and foremost the gaming and 3D platforms like Unreal Engine (Epic Games) and Omniverse (NVIDIA) with enterprise solutions and millions of developers. NVIDIA is spearheading the development of digital twins in industry, launching the “industrial metaverse” together with Siemens. The obstacle lies somewhere else, in gathering the necessary data, in installing trackers and in changing the attitude of “we don’t need this, my Excel table does the job”. Beyond the metaverse and 3D trend the cloud market leader offers out-of-the-box solutions like AWS TwinMaker and Azure Digital Twins. We’ll find in the game the very good Apple ARKit, the “other” 3D platforms like Unity and specialists for a use case — we’d mention ANNEA from Hamburg, a solution for creating digital twins for predictive maintenance of machines (especially for the renewable energy sector).
DToC.
Digital Twin of a Consumer is an exciting new development. One can imagine great use cases of reproducing a consumer action within a product launch, an ad campaign, a society trend. Provided the data and history is available. It’s all about defining, simulating and predicting a consumer action — it’s marketing pure and a sign of what marketing will be in the future: data, narrow use cases, simulation, performance.
Promise of better.
Behind the digital twin trend there is the promise of both lower cost and better engagement. Lower costs for production of any objects in manufacturing — a car prototype developed real-time from around the world in 3D instead of traditional physical building and testing. By the way, it is indispensable for testing autonomous vehicle use cases. But also build a warehouse, a supermarket, a railway as a twin before construction — it just makes sense. The promise of better engagement is based on the fact that we, humans, grasp things in images better than in text or spreadsheets. A better engagement for a sun glasses try-on, for placing a new sofa in a room, for testing a car cockpit design and for predicting a consumer behaviour. Young professionals, young engineers are growing with digital twins in games and will form the next big trend “Digital Twins” from within the companies.
Exciting perspective.
We’re confirming our choice for the 2023 Digital Trend study — it is digital twins, a catalyst of all new technology development, of the data resource priority, of AI models and covering many use cases up to reproducing consumers’ actions. The right thing for a 2023 with tighter economic perspectives and a huge availability of tools. It’s an exciting time, let’s start with an idea, a concept, a project, a test, an execution.
Author: Laurent Burdin is founder of the innovation and trend agency Space and Lemon Innovations, in Hamburg and Berlin. Launched in 2016, Space and Lemon Innovations is full of optimism in this point of view of 2023. Digital Twins.
