In a world where people are comfortable stepping into virtual reality experiences, partnering with AI to do their job and increasingly relying on swathes of data to make decisions, digital twins have become a core part of the conversation. But what is a digital twin, really?
Science fiction movies, and some vendor presentations, would have you believe that a digital twin has to be a complex, high-fidelity digital representation of something real, continually fed by real-time data from various sensors—and it can be that. But more often than not it’s much simpler.
Take the digital twin that’s shown on a Tesla screen. It’s definitely not high fidelity, but it does reflect what a useful digital twin is: It simplifies something complex to only present the information needed to make a decision. In Tesla’s case, it is to see the obstacles around you.