Backend or Frontend Digital Twins
How you interact with a Digital Twin depends on your perspective
We always think of web developers as being put into buckets. Two of these buckets are the front end engineer and the backend engineer.
Their approach to developing the same application is very different from their perspectives, development environment, query languages, and end-users. Digital Twins are really the same way. You have the technicians who work with highly detailed models, built using proprietary tools existing as absolute replication of the built world. These are the backend engineers, concerned with making sure the model is exactly how it is in the real world and not much concern for the end-users. The Digital Twin itself is more important than the people using it.
Then you have the frontend engineer working with APIs and data, but not the Digital Twin itself. While the 3D model exists for these engineers, it is usually simplified,. The model is connected to 3rd party IoT services that add additional value, sometimes more value in fact than the model itself. The frontend engineer is very concerned with how users will interact with the Digital Twin, making design choices that focus on ease of use or understandability over accurate 3D models. A happy user who gets value out of the Digital Twin makes a frontend engineer very happy.
What we don’t see too much of is full-stack Digital Twin engineers. Those who are very happy are worried about the “BIM/CAD to Twin” conversion and how to store hyper-accurate models in the cloud. But at the same time, think about how to present these models in so many different formats, from Google Spreadsheets to AR. I think there is plenty of opportunity to become one as many creators of Digital Twins have experience with creating or managing BIM/CAD/GIS data. It’s the visualization of that data, combining it with IoT services and Augmented Reality applications where they have less experience.
This all comes up because a soon to be graduate in this space asked me where I would put efforts to get more experience with Digital Twins and I really think we need full-stack Digital Twin engineers. Not just focused on one thing but those who can do the whole stack. In the end, for a Digital Twin to succeed, we need managers of that twin to understand how a Digital Twin gets created as well as how it gets disseminated. Those people will be of high value just how full-stack engineers are in software development.
Sorry for the late newsletter this week. Everyone in my family got a head cold and it was touch and go around the house. Somehow I survived but it was so crazy. Stay health and safe everyone!