A highly elaborate digital twin of Singapore is headed to the metaverse

SINGAPORE: Singapore has been entirely modeled in 3D thanks to a local startup, which now aims to bring it into the metaverse. This virtual version of Singapore will also be used by professionals who wish to market their products, as well as for games and leisure purposes.

The entire state of Singapore has been modeled in 3D, which reportedly makes it the world's largest digital twin. This feat was achieved by Singaporean startup Vizzio Technologies, which used thousands of satellite photos and, through the power of artificial intelligence, was able to reconstruct the entire city, block by block, street by street, with painstaking precision. It should be noted that Vizzio doesn't intend to stop at Singapore and hopes to be able to "clone" other large cities digitally in the near future.

This digital twin can collect a multitude of information in real time via sensors, drones and other tools, with the goal of improving its performance in areas like energy consumption and environmental concerns and to make the city more intelligent through insights generated by this twin.

But Vizzio isn't stopping there; it intends to use all this data to create a virtual version of Singapore in the metaverse. The idea would be to be able to use this digital city, entirely recreated on a 1:1 scale, to develop new applications, whether in the realm of leisure or for setting up a professional business. It will also enable companies to market their services and products, as in "real life."

While Singapore's entry into the metaverse is its most comprehensive version to date, the country launched its first digital twin, called Virtual Singapore, back in 2014. It was primarily intended to test new technologies and support policy decisions.

The concept of a digital twin consists of recreating, in virtual form, an existing infrastructure, whether it is a simple connected object, a more complex system or, as in this case, an entire city, in order to study and analyze its behaviors in a bid to optimize its performance.

Singapore is not the only major city to have been modeled this way for practical purposes. Seoul recently launched a major modeling project in order to offer its inhabitants optimized services within the metaverse. The aim is to improve their daily lives and enable them to take advantage of all the city's services, once they're immersed in this virtual representation.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas is also preparing to launch a major project for collecting information related to the CO2 emissions of its transportation and buildings. The goal is to create a sort of 3D clone of its downtown area in order to study the activity taking place and find solutions to boost the city's sustainability and decrease its CO2 emissions.