Urban India’s 3D digital twins are on their way to be born

Amaravati, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, too, is already being built as a digital twin. Mumbai-based Genesys International, a geospatial products and solutions firm that announced plans to create a Digital Twin of India’s top 100 cities about 18 months ago, hopes to complete 20 digital twins by the end of 2024. CE Infosystems, better known as MapmyIndia, too is working on a 3D digital twin in India.

A Digital Twin is a three-dimensional (3D) virtual representation of an object or system that deliver real-time insights into the performance, operation, or profitability of a physical object—even a city.

The digital twin of a city, thus, can help policymakers improve city governance and the urban ecosystem by enabling better planning of infrastructure at lower costs.

Sajid Malik, chairman and managing director of Genesys, said his company plans to cover “the top 20 cities of India in the next 12-18 months. These are the bigger areas from a geographic coverage point of view—the other cities are smaller. Our progress has also been made possible due to India’s new geospatial policy (National Geospatial Policy 2022), which now allows us to collect and create content.”

In December 2021, Genesys launched a programme that envisaged providing 3D data for the top 100 cities in the country with the aim to develop applications that could solve multiple problems facing urban India. In July 2022, it partnered with Esri India, a Geographic Information System (GIS) software and solutions provider, to help it provide a technology platform for 3D modelling and analysis of the data.

Two months later, Genesys also announced a partnership with infrastructure engineering software company Bentley Systems. The idea, according to Malik, was to add engineering and application data layers to the 3D digital twins of each city to enable local governments to improve public services including urban governance, disaster management, emergency response, and tourism.

But developing a 3D digital twin of a city is an onerous task. Genesys International is already working with Google Street View for street imagery and hopes to collect around 1 million kilometres of images of towns and cities by the end of this year.

“This is a high-definition engineering grade map where every inch of the city is brought within a GIS system,” said Malik. To create a digital twin, one needs multiple layers of data. “So, we have to collect aerial data and obliques (sides of buildings), etc., to create a 360 degree, immersive experience of every part of the city. Street imagery implies that we also capture all the street furniture, the road information, stores, storefront data, etc.,” explained Malik.