DIGITAL CHAMPION | DIGITAL TWINS This gives you a whole new level of useability. It makes the digital model useful not just for the design or construction stage, but also for asset management cannot get the full experience of what they are seeing and what they are building, Patel says. With the digital sector continuing to evolve rapidly, Buro Happolds digital team talked to Epic Games (the maker of Fortnite) about using its Unreal Engine software to create real-time 3D content for its digital twins. It would allow users to jump into the model and be in a place virtually, which would make it a really useful communication tool for clients and the different engineering disciplines on a project, says Patel. The benefit of using gaming software is that it allows the model to be adapted in real time. We didnt want to do what everyone else does preload data into the model, which makes it a huge application. We wanted the data to flow from our database and we had already built the mechanism to enable that, says Patel. This gives you a whole new level of useability. It makes the digital model useful, not just for the design or construction stage, but also for asset management, because you can bring in different live data sources by connecting in IoT [internet of things] devices. This methodology allows for live-operation digital twins and dashboards to manage a city, for example. Tomorrows epic cities Epic Games could see the potential in Buro Happolds proposals and awarded it an Epic MegaGrant. This supported the digital team while it spent time navigating the technical challenges of using a gaming engine to stream geospatial data into an application in real time, then render it and make it interactive. The MegaGrant allowed us to build up the functionality and to develop new texturing techniques within Unreal to make the buildings look realistic, explains Patel. Every time we had a conversation with Epic, we showed them what we were trying to do and what wed done. They were very interested to push it further; some of the stuff we showed them they had not seen before. Buro Happolds gaming engine-driven digital twin development has progressed to the stage where it is now capable of building advanced interactive digital models for numerous applications. There are so many possibilities. When a user gets into the VR digital twin, they are able to interact with the data, so they can move buildings around, delete buildings and draw new ones; they can add comments for review and even tag people, Patel enthuses. Whats more, everything is coming from a single source of truth: all the data is in one place and all the engineers work from it and update it, so the model is always live and always up to date. The generalised methodology Buro Happold has developed allows it to generate digital twins for cities worldwide. Patel uses a masterplanning project to redevelop a city (he is unable to say which one) to explain how these models are being used. Before the client set about redeveloping 46 March 2024 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE March 24 pp44-47 Digital Twin Cities.indd 46 23/02/2024 17:01