Digital-Twin Technologies for Smart Cities and Indigenous Futurism

NATACHA ALPERT: Welcome to my talk Digital Twin Technologies for Smart Cities 2025 & Indigenous Futurism for a Sustainable World. I am Natacha Alpert, the CEO of Natureverse.

Smart cities will be part of our daily lives for the next 5 to 10 years, creating a sustainable future for humanity for industry 5.0. In this talk, I will highlight the key concepts of smart cities, digital twin technologies, the movement of indigenous futurism to identify solutions for climate change, and how we use Maya here at Natureverse.

Are we there yet? That is the biggest question that we have to think about. The digital revolution is associated with lots of changes to technologies that have traditionally been employed in manufacturing and product development over the past decades. Sustainable development is one of the biggest worldwide issues we need to address, especially when we look at the impact of manufactured products. The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100.

The purpose of digital twin technology, smart cities, and digital platforms that we are creating here at Natureverse in VR, AR, and platform driven is to really promote purpose-driven technology values and to inspire you all here today to use the tools that Autodesk creates such as Maya to build these products to create platforms that have an impact to humanity in the digital space, to build community in the digital space, to promote sustainability, corporate citizenship, and diversity and inclusion.

I like to reference one of my favorite visionary inventors, Buckminster Fuller. And we are much, much bigger than just designers and artists. And he had a really interesting philosophy that a designer is an emerging synthesis of artists, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.

On a global level, global cities and the United Nations are exploring how smart city initiatives intersect with the global goal of making urbanization inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. By linking these goals, many cities are starting to build digital twins of their own cities and starting to use this technology to construct smart cities.

But let's define a smart city. A smart city is a city that uses advanced technology and data analytics to improve the quality of life for its citizens, enhance sustainability, and streamline urban services. Smart cities often have features such as connected sensors, smart grid systems, energy efficient buildings, and advanced transportation systems.

These will be the cities of our future. But let's also define a digital twin because there are many different definitions of a digital twin. So a digital twin is a virtual model or near real-time digital image of a physical object, process, product, production asset, or service.

Just to dive into the history of the digital twin, in the 1960s, NASA developed a twin to assess and simulate conditions on board the Apollo 13 spaceship. The oxygen tanks aboard Apollo 13 had exploded early in the mission. Having the twin of the aircraft back on Earth allowed NASA to try out different solutions and simulations.

There are five different levels of digital twin maturity. The first would be descriptive. Second would been informative. The third is predictive, where AI comes in. The fourth is comprehensive. And then the last and final most advanced digital twin maturity level is autonomous.

Now let's define a digital twin of a smart city. Digital twins have taken the role of an integrated centralized platform becoming the brain of a city capable of hosting diverse sets of information. The long-term vision of a digital twin of a city pursues three visions, more intensive and efficient urban production and operations such as community portals, livable and convenient urban living spaces, and a sustainable urban ecological environment.

I'd like to give some examples of leading digital twins of smart cities that exist right now today. Singapore has developed a digital twin of a city known as Virtual Singapore, which uses 3D mapping and real-time data to simulate various aspects of the city, including transportation, utilities, and buildings.

Helsinki has developed a digital twin of the city known as the Helsinki 3D model, which is used for urban planning and environmental modeling. The model is based on LiDAR data, which is collected using laser scanners and includes information about the city's buildings. Orlando, Florida has an immersive real-time 3D digital twin that recreates 800 square miles of the region. China, Shanghai, and Beijing have built an intelligent and advanced city brain for their digital twins of their cities.

Smart cities are enabled by BIM such as Revit to GIS to digital twin for a connected infrastructure. Geospatial data from GPS devices, hyperspectral images, and sensors have enabled GIS platforms to create, render, and analyze infrastructure data at a temporal scale. The use cases are for fraud and abuse to detect patterns of fraud, collision, claims, credit card fraud, retails, site selection, urban planning, foot traffic analysis, for financial services, economic distribution, loan risk analysis, predicting sales at retail investments, for health care, identifying disease epicenters, environmental impact on plant planning and health care, especially for disaster recovery, flood surveys, earthquake mapping, and response planning.

FEMA has been using digital twin for a very long time. Defense and Intel, reconnaissance, threat detection, and damage assessment. Infrastructure, transportation planning, agricultural management, housing development and energy. Climate change analysis, energy asset inspection, and oil discovery.

On a larger scale for infrastructure, digital twin technology is being used already in ports, airports, trains, automotive, parks, which I'll go into with our business, with Natureverse, retail and tourism. But how can we connect this all to the history of the land? I'd done a recent project with an Indigenous tribe in the Amazon. And through this use case, we saw that Indigenous people are often historized and placed in the past without imagining what the future might look like.

Grace Dillon coined the term Indigenous Futurism, paying homage to Afrofuturism. Indigenous futurism is a cultural and literary movement that explores the intersections of indigenous cultures and technologies, such as digital twin technologies, where you could simulate climate change in the Amazon or Indigenous villages and tribes, often using science fiction to imagine and create these new worlds. In the literary and cultural movement, we're seeing a connection and use case for digital twin technology to help simulate how areas can be improved due to climate change.

Indigenous futurism is a way for people to reclaim their histories, cultures, and futures and to envision a world where their traditions and knowledge are honored and respected. And that data is actually captured. Indigenous futurism often incorporates elements of indigenous cosmology, storytelling, ways of knowing, and ways to reimagine the relationship between technology and the natural world.

Some examples are how Indigenous peoples are trying to defend Earth's biodiversity, but they're in danger and how indigenous land victories can cool a warming planet. By using digital twin technologies such as how digital twin technologies are used in smart cities, this can also be applied to help improve climate change.

There are other big use cases of how indigenous futurism has really made an impact to make a point of areas that need help on planet Earth. But big picture, we can learn from planet Earth. And this talk and this class is here-- I'm here to inspire you all to see how we created the Natureverse platform using Maya and how digital twin technology has a gamified use case for consumers.

And with that, I'm going to give you all a sneak peek into what Natureverse is and then some behind-the-scenes technical work that was done in Maya to create one of our AI guides. Just an overview of what Natureverse is. Natureverse welcomes you to an innovative journey where technologies and the wonders of the natural world converge. Natureverse is a VR, AR, and web browser-based platform that bridges between brands and immersive nature education. Through this partnership, we aim to revolutionize digitally how people can engage with and learn about the environment.

Our vision is to create a sustainable digital bridge to nature, aligning brands with impactful sustainability and education initiatives. Natureverse seeks to lead the way in fostering a deeper connection between individuals and the natural world. This alignment with brands committed to sustainability reflects our dedication to preserving our planet for future generations.

Our platform is a little different than what's out there because it includes gamification, AI guides, and digital twins. Natureverse is redefining environmental education through captivating experiences. Our platform leverages gamification, AI guides, and digital twins to offer immersive and educational adventures.

There's a term out there right now called travel portation. And rather than looking at a National Geographic magazine or a travel log, we are seeing from all of our research that VR platforms, AR platforms will be engaging users with the environment like never before, gaining insights into the intricacies of our planet's ecosystems. We'd like to inspire you all how we use Maya to create this platform.

Natureverse will also create in-store retail immersive experiences designed to captivate customers on multiple sensory levels in store. We are going to be partnering with many outdoor brands where consumers can learn about the biodiversity and Earth aligned with your brand values. This would be in store with interactive displays, immersive touch screens, 3D polarized glasses.

AR and VR stations will provide customers with dynamic hands-on experiences. We create immersive storytelling that highlights brands product features, benefits in tandem with the gamification experience for consumers for Natureverse for exclusive products and with that, I'm going to show you all a video.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Welcome to Natureverse where technology in nature unite for a transformative experience. Immerse yourself in digital twins of Earth's wonders, unlocking scientific and biodiversity treasures. Begin your adventure aboard our Natureverse airship. Choose your eye guide, your companion on this educational journey. With your Natureverse globe watch, explore locations in the past and future.

Discover the history of Yellowstone, Earth's first national park. Witness the vibrant Grand Prismatic Spring, a marvel of colors and science. Learn about microbial mats and their impact on medicine and space research. See how debris has affected the ecosystem, and take action with our Natureverse.

Help clean up the Grand Prismatic, and you'll receive exclusive collector's items. Use your Natureverse globe watch to explore the effects of climate change. Thank you for joining Natureverse expeditions. Explore, learn, and make a difference. Join us in preserving Earth's beauty of natural wonders. Natureverse, where education meets sustainability.

[END PLAYBACK]

NATACHA ALPERT: And with that I'm going to give everyone a behind the scenes look at how our gnome Bernie was created with Maya.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- So here we have our gnome character. And he has joints but no control rig. So we can set up a control rig and have him set up so we can transfer motion capture onto him fairly easily using HumanIK. Just click this button here to open the HumanIK interface. And the first thing we need to do-- we already have a skeleton. So we can skip that part. What we need to do is do a character definition. We have to tell HumanIK what our character is.

So we don't have to have the bones with any magic names in it or anything like that. But we do have to assign it into the slot. This will act as a layer of abstraction. So the system knows, for example, what our hip joints is. Just right-click and click Assign Selected Bone. Boom.

You can go on down through the list. Notice when I do the left side, the right side is automatically filled in. Now I can go in and get fancy and start adding in roll joints. Go back up. And do the same to the lower leg.

We need at least one spine joint, but we can open this up and add our other ones. This will give us a more accurate solve when we do things like transfer motion capture. Now notice I have all these extra spots, and I only have four joints. That's fine. The system doesn't know how many joints you're going to have in your character. So it put in like way more than hopefully you will need.

Do the same for the neck. [INAUDIBLE] do that because that one is our head. Open that up, and we can put in our clavicle.

So the ones in this panel all have to be filled out in order for this to work. But when you go into these little subsections, you don't have to fill every single joint out. So this is the minimum. But then we can go in here and start adding in things like the roll joints and the fingers.

So you'll notice that these slots here are in yellow. This is telling us that he is not in T-pose. Simple way to fix that. Just rotate these joints up. I had to go into the front view.

So the reason for the T-pose is that that way the system has a unified place to start from when doing the solve. It doesn't have to guess what our character's initial state is.

So you could have finished this up with them still in A-pose. But then if you transferred motion capture from another character and that character was assumed to be in a T-pose, which is the standard, then it wouldn't line up correctly. So let's just go ahead and make sure he's in a T-pose. And then we can lock this down.

So now our character is defined. And then we click this button here. And now we have our control rig. So now if we come up here to the Content Browser, Let's bring this animation into our scene, slide them over a bit.

Now we can switch to this guy. This guy is already characterized so we don't have to do any of that setup. So what we can do is simply say for our gnome character, which is character 1, you can tell the source instead of the control rig to do muscle flex. And there we go.

[END PLAYBACK]

NATACHA ALPERT: And so you got to see behind the scenes how Bernie was rigged in Maya. So how was this all important? By using digital twin technologies, by using LiDAR scans, by creating characters, by creating new platforms, we wanted to inspire everyone in this talk about how Natureverse has this vision to create digital platforms using these tools.

Everything is changing in our world. And we feel here at Natureverse that to create a digital platform and virtual reality, augmented reality, and immersive experiences can teach consumers, users, future generations what nature provides, 3.85 billion years of trial and error, research and development, and rigorous quality control testing that resulted in a 99.9 failure rate with 30 million different species of organisms living on Earth today that are actual success stories.

Nature has figured out materials, forms, processes, and systems and strategies needed to sustain themselves and conditions on Earth as it is today. The very same conditions in which we must sustain ourselves. I hope to inspire you with this talk with why these types of digital platforms, creating these digital characters, and these immersive gamified experiences are important for brands and consumers.

The why, the more goodness and opportunities we create, the more we will support authentic, social impact for the future in platforms that our children and future generations are actually starting to use today. The more likely we will see collective action on virtual stages. The more tangible actions will shape and support causes and brands.

Who is going to use these types of platforms like digital twins? Indigenous tribes, creators, consumers, brands, nonprofits, education, sports, health care, and grassroots groups where you will see these digital platforms as community portals and smart cities as gamified experiences or just simply some type of immersive experience when you walk into a retail store.

How is this going to be created? By sharing content via digital twins that is created with Revit, in Tandem, in Autodesk, and many other tech platforms right now, with diversity and inclusion that can be represented on these digital platforms, engaging and learning, participating and giving, virtual volunteering, building community, and creating these virtual platforms for longevity. Thank you so much for stopping in to listen to my class and talk, and looking forward to seeing everyone in person at AU 2023.