The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT) in the real world via models, simulations, (remotely) sensed data, context awareness, and interactions. However, interaction requires appropriate interfaces to address the complexity of the city. Ultimately, leveraging the potential of Smart Cities requires going beyond assembling the DT to be comprehensive and accessible. Situated Analytics allows for the anchoring of city information in its spatial context. We advance the concept of embedding the DT into the PT through Situated Analytics to form Fused Twins (FTs). This fusion allows access to data in the location that it is generated in in an embodied context that can make the data more understandable. Prototypes of FTs are rapidly emerging from different domains, but Smart Cities represent the context with the most potential for FTs in the future. This paper reviews DTs, Situated Analytics, and Smart Cities as the foundations of FTs. Regarding DTs, we define five components (physical, data, analytical, virtual, and Connection Environments) that we relate to several cognates (i.e., similar but different terms) from existing literature. Regarding Situated Analytics, we review the effects of user embodiment on cognition and cognitive load. Finally, we classify existing partial examples of FTs from the literature and address their construction from Augmented Reality, Geographic Information Systems, Building/City Information Models, and DTs and provide an overview of future directions.

Digital Twins and Enabling Technologies in Museums and Cultural Heritage: An Overview

“…Fused DT stands for the “concept of embedding the DT into the PT through situated analytics” and their interaction, they are visualized in Mixed Reality [ 4 ]. Further AI-based features are realized in the cognitive twin.…”

“…From the perspective of the Internet of Things (IoT) (for abbreviations see Table A1 in Appendix A ), the ViM implements connected indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces with their artwork and infrastructure, using a network of hardware devices, sensors, middleware and embedded software that collect and exchange data and offer services and facilities to visitors and to other museums as well [ 4 ].…”

“…Based on a reference corpus resulting from a search for scientific publications in books, journals and conference papers on the keywords virtual museums , digital twins , emerging technologies and sensor in leading science databases [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ], we classify DTs according to their application areas, relevant technologies and concepts depending on type, focus and features, sensor technology used and adaptation or innovation power throughout their life cycle. Design, realization, operation and evolution are guided by experts, engineers, customers, curators, software engineers and visitors, all of whom define adequate quality criteria (QC) and metrics (QM) for DTs and ViMs V&VA.…”

“…In this review paper, we examine prominent science databases for occurrences of the terms virtual, museum, digital, twin, emerging, technologies, and sensor in journals, book chapters, conference papers and ePublications. Recent searches in Scopus, IEEEXplore, and Google Scholar with the search string “virtual AND museum AND digital AND twin AND emerging AND technologies AND sensor” yield 43 relevant publications [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ] from the last 13 years, 34 of which were in Scopus, 3 of which were excluded because the keywords were used in other meanings, such as “Siamese twins” (cf. Figure 1 and Figure A1 in the Appendix A ).…”

“…The corpus and other relevant references studied have focused on introductory overviews, taxonomies, DTs with different orientations and various features, and augmented DTs in a variety of ways. Before turning to a systematic approach in Section 2 highlighting these papers, we offer a list of these foci: Digital twin modeling [ 3 ], digital twin in Industry: State-of-the-art [ 46 ], fused twins [ 4 ], applications of digital twin across industries [ 47 ], digital twin reference model development to prevent operators’ risk in process plants [ 48 ], DUET: A framework for building secure and trusted digital twins of smart cities [ 49 ], risk-informed digital twins for the built environment [ 50 ], urban digital twins [ 19 ], digital twin paradigm [ 36 ], augmented reality and digital twin system for interaction [ 37 ], digital twin augmentation [ 38 ], feature-oriented digital twins for life cycle phases and risk-informed DT [ 39 ], 3D reconstruction, digital twinning and virtual reality [ 41 ], populating the data space for cultural heritage with heritage digital twins [ 42 ], and robot DT [ 43 ]. A methodological analysis is given in Section 2 .…”