Digital twins just got more real

Last year, Nextspace received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games, which was used to support the production of stunningly crafted digital twins visualized using Epic's Unreal Engine technology, with substantive engineering and business data at their heart, courtesy of data amalgamation platform Nextspace.

Engineering and business worlds can now organise their data for faster, better decisions in digital twin visualizations, understand and communicate those decisions with the three-dimensional excellence of the world’s most popular experiential games. 

3D visualization is an exceptional tool to navigate a complex data collections. Traditional spreadsheets, tables, and graphs work for those close to the data, but don’t make sense to those focused on other tasks. 

We believe digital twins are first and foremost data models. Once data is harmonized, machines have what they need to compute, simulate and predict. And humans can understand data through visualizations. This is Unreal Engine bringing information to life.

Mark Thomas, Nextspace Founder and CEO

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Nextspace has GUID (Globally Unique IDs) and ontology management as founding principles for all digital twin creation and management. Digital twins built on Nextspace’s customisable and extensible platform employ a single unified (data agnostic) data model.

This model starts with the definition of a real world challenge. Then, from that challenge the model identifies the things that matter most. Next, assignment of their attributes and relationships with each other, including all valid visual proxies. Once connected through ontological relationship principles, this model can be streamed to the chosen visualization engine: Unreal.

Unreal Engine’s collaboration with Cesium is central to the success of the Nextspace innovation. Nextspace already offered Cesium as a visualization tool, so the opportunity to overlay Unreal Engine rendering within Cesium tilesets was a step up to the next level. And it’s all available online 24/7 as Nextspace is a cloud-based digital twin platform. 

With Nextspace’s new Unreal Engine integration, digital twins will get exceptional visual quality with live data updating the experience in real time – this is another step in helping a range of industries better address operational, infrastructure and planning challenges.

Ken Pimentel, Epic Games 

We couldn’t have said it better.