Creating New Era
Introduction
2020 has past and a lot of things are happening right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of things – lifestyles, health care, education, and economy, just to name a few – and the digitising of our world has become fundamental not only for humans but also artificial intelligence. During the lockdown, people can only experience the world only through the screen and there is a limitation with that. However, there are also good opportunities for industries to expand in this digital world or more incredibly turn the world around us into digital. Thus, indicates the beginning of a new era of digital twins and the “Mirror World“.
What is Mirror World?
The picture above shows Es Devlin in a mirror maze where there are all mirrors on the wall that looks quite fascinating. However, the term “Mirror world” is not literally just a space with mirrors. This idea emerged after the concept of digital twins – a digital representation of a physical object or process – was introduced during the 1970 Apollo 13 mission. MIrror World is a perfect thing that resembles digital twins. The idea behind digital twins is the analysis of real-time data rather than just point-in-time data. For instance, the differences between a ‘Mirror’ (real-time) image and a ‘photo’ (static point-in-time) image whereby a vast amount of data needs to be captured and transformed to where the analytic was performed for the real-time analytics. This eventually will bring us to a whole different topic.
Based on what has written by Kevin Keely in Wired, the mirror world can be described as the fusion of existing technologies to form a cohesive system – online mapping, bog data, 3D modeling, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), lidar – which allows us to create a digital twin that filled with information and ready to be manipulated, This term was first popularized by Yale computer scientist, David Gelernter, and it reflects not just what something looks like but its context, meaning, and also function. Mirror world has opened a path where it can link between the physical and digital world and also opened up new possibilities to AR technology.
The Existence of Mirror World
As for now, this Mirror World is not yet fully exist as this world is very complex to build and has a lot of circumstances that need to be considered. However, the application of these digital twins can obviously be seen nowadays.
Building Information Modeling – BIM
BIM (Building Information Modeling) in construction and industries, is an example application of digital twins that can be described as a potential layer of Mirror World. The features that can extract accurately in the building zones in 3D make it easier to manage infrastructure throughout all jobs in the industry. You can read “Why BIM matters” for more information about BIM.
Local Lenses in Snapchat
Snapchat has introduced a new VR feature, Local Lens which the first one is called City Painter. This feature allows the camera in the Snapchat app to view Carnaby street and let the users spray a great fountain of red and blue paint above Carnaby shops, decorating the bricks with predesigned graffiti murals. Aside from the painting itself, people can see others spraying their paint and also can battle between the users to cover the shops in colours. This Local lens also has the potential to open a path for the new concept – the ‘Mirror World’ – where the Snapchat camera needs to understand individual buildings and allow them to interact with the building, thus, creating the digital twin for the buildings. Read more about this Snapchat feature at “Snapchat has turned London into an augmented reality experiment” and also this video:
Thoughts about Mirror World
As a student, this idea is kind of interesting where there is a duplicate of our world that is separated from the real world by a plane. However, a lot of things need to be considered about the pros and cons. Furthermore, the new idea of “metaverse” that was recently announced by Mark Zuckerberg had opened a lot of thoughts and critics by others as this “Meta” concept is new and different from any technologies that exist. These are some sites that I would love to recommend to someone who is new to this Metavese as this will effects our near future probably. I also need a lot more reading to understand what will happen in the future because no one can predict the future. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment – AiManSyaf
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