Blog post

Three ways digital twins can transform online engagement

This week, the BBC published news of a digital twin education project that will see students in Leeds being given virtual tours of the Auschwitz Museum. A great project and one that caught my eye as being one of the highest profile examples I’ve seen showcasing the benefits of virtual tour (or ‘digital twin’) technology.

This article also feels timely, as I’ve been extolling the virtues and, in particular, untapped marketing potential of this technology for some time.

Initially started as a photography add-on for the world of estate agents, digital twins were seen as a ‘nice to have’ for a while: a fun way to look around a space but lacking in any real call to action or engagement with the customer:

An example of a house-based digital twin

‘Hotspots’ – information points with links, media and downloads – helped push this into the ‘More Useful’ category, especially during COVID, when businesses had no choice but to move online if they wanted visitors through their doors.

But as tech changes so too must perceptions of what is possible and the latest range of 3D capture cameras and software are a world away from looking around a two up two down!

I’m going to look at three key areas why, if physical premises are a central feature of a business, they can only stand to gain from the rapidly expanding world of digital twins:

Use 1 – visitor orientation

We’ve all been there: you arrive at a huge facility – a hospital, a tech campus, a secret military bunker (OK maybe not the last one) and your first reaction is to look around for a jumbled noticeboard to find signs helpfully telling you where to go.

This sets you off on a breadcrumb trail to make Hansel and Gretel nervous as you go deeper into faceless corridors only to find you’ve made a wrong turn and now can’t find your way back. Cue Terry Gilliam Brazil-esque madness.

Digital twins are millimetre perfect captures of real-life premises, and of such high resolution that wayfinding app software can recognise exactly where you are based on comparing the captured 3D to what your phone is seeing:

It overlays content (controlled in a back-end) and plots the waypoints in real time – no GPS, no need for expensive near field technologies. It simply overlays a 3D model into the real world because it knows 1) the model is measurement accurate and 2) it recognises where you are by matching visual reference points. The potential use cases for this are huge:

Help visitors find their way to appointments
Student or staff orientation on Day 1
Education and gamification – create education treasure hunts or fact filled tours
Replace audio headsets with guided voiceover tours and on screen information with clear on-screen guidance
No more wandering blindly around endless corridors whilst sinking into some sort of existential abyss and no giant IT bill to power it all.

Use 2 – guided online tours

Covid was the real turning point for this technology when everything stopped. The end was nigh. Worst of all, people were not allowed into your premises.

Businesses found that digital twins were a good way of at least offering some of the experience of a real life visit, be it a showroom, a factory, a museum or a shop floor. The only thing missing was the human touch – a way of interacting that prevented a visit to the digital twin being the equivalent of walking round an empty shop going ‘Hello Hello?? Is anyone there???”

One thing we did all take away from our Covid experience was the now ubiquitous video call interface of Zoom (other brands are available) – we all live and breath online chat now and its become second nature. So how about an exciting new way of bringing real people into your real premises face to face…but online. Confused? Maybe watch this video:

Now imagine showing around new employees as a pre-arrival meet and greet, or a guided tour on a job interview; showing around VIPs, potential overseas clients, sponsors or paid for personal tours; security or safety reviews or showing stakeholders around a building work in progress – and not one of them needs to leave their office chair. Real time sight lines, real time conversation with real people. The amount of revenue streams this could open up for

the heritage, hospitality, tourism or sports world makes me giddy. And all you need to achieve it is one digital twin.

Use 3 – On site surveying and work flow acceleration

OK OK you got me – I confess I deliberately started with the two sexy options. “Workflow acceleration??” Hits exit But hear me out, I promise it’ll be worth your time! In the US, digital twins are revolutionising insurance, construction and survey work, also bringing a sustainability bonus in the process- the shift is in the technology, which is now liDAR-enabled for accuracy, can shoot in broad daylight, and a back-end that can rapidly produce working files that can be updated over time and are accessible 24/7 anywhere in the world. This means insurance companies can save thousands of pounds a year in sending insurance adjusters out to a site – simply capture the digital twin and send the files over. What’s more, if you have a digital twin on file and submitted to your insurance company, how easy could that make claims in the worst instance of a fire, flood, burglary or property damage? Compare before and after and make a reasonable assessment of damage, flag areas of concern, highlight questions – remote teams can even review a site together in real time (see 2 above). On the surveying and construction side, you can create millimetre accurate scans of sites to be developed for remote risk assessments and project planning. Properties in development can be captured during build, with file exports to packages such as CAD and BIM. These can be compared to original plans, review progression over time and flag errors or concerns that can be analysed and discussed by architects, construction engineers, surveyors and designers without driving teams to site and having to walking round wearing ear defenders and avoiding need for safety orientations, trip hazards and the sort of large equipment that carries images of a stickman being zapped. All of these industries require staff travelling to sites and long timescales to produce usable assets. The simplification of these processes – reducing travelling and time on the road, staying in Premiere Inns (other brands are available…), doing things humans need to do on the road like eating and drinking – all of this time and financial cost can be saved by sending one person to capture your site and sending a link. The stats speak for themselves:

75% decrease in in-person site visits from project stakeholders
70% reduction in site survey costs and BIM file creation
30% cost and time savings with increased collaboration and faster decision-making
75% of project issues resolved without escalation

The saving in terms of carbon emissions over a year alone could be considerable, the time (and as a result financial) savings huge, and your teams can visit the site again and again and again from anywhere in the world, at any time. The only thing to suffer here would be your hotel Rewards balance. So, there we have it, three areas in which digital twins are set to transform online business opportunities – there’s others but I’ll explore those in future articles. If you are interested in exploring these opportunities, hit me up, I’d love to discuss your ideas.