Digital replicas of buildings and cities will one day link together to form a parallel world where people work, play and socialise, according to David Weir-McCall of gaming company Epic Games.
Weir-McCall has predicted that the fast-growing phenomenon of digital twins will merge with the metaverse, an evolving network of digital spaces that includes video-game environments and virtual-reality worlds.
David Weir-McCall is a business development manager for Epic Games. Top image: Epic Games' Fortnite hosted a virtual Travis Scott concert in April 2020
"The metaverse is this digital world that lives alongside our physical one and allows us to live, work and play alongside each other," said Weir-McCall, a business development manager for Epic Games with a background in architecture and technology. "And digital twins are the foundations that the metaverse will be built on," he told Dezeen.
The next version of the internet
Digital twins are clones of real-world objects and systems. The technology is revolutionising the way architects and designers work. In a recent interview with Dezeen, Mansoor Kazerouni of architecture firm IBI Group described them as "a very powerful way of developing, evolving and designing our cities."
The metaverse, meanwhile, is often referred to as the next version of the internet, featuring video-game-style interactivity instead of static web pages. A primitive version of this was demonstrated at Dezeen's Metaverse Meet-Up...