Is a 3D Mesh Really a Digital Twin? Kelly Watt Breaks the Industry’s Biggest Myth

and the effort that it takes to learn and to be able to create these amazing deliverables, whether it is a drone, whether it's your terrestrial capture, whether it's your BIM model.

And even I, and you go back and I have published stating things were a digital twin when they weren't.

I completely profess that that has been the case because we didn't really understand the intention of Michael Vicks when he created the term and what it was supposed to mean.

I had to self-correct myself when I truly understood the depth of what it's supposed to mean.

I was trying to communicate that to others too because what I find, especially in the consulting field I'm in right now, because there's a lot of written works on this topic, you have executives, you have certain individuals that do the research and there's an expectation that the deliverable is going to meet certain things.

And then when they come back and there's vendors and manufacturers promising the same term, but a completely different thing, it creates a lot of confusion and a lot of challenges for the industry.

So that's one thing, just be a little cautious on terms.

And when we use them, understand the implications of those terms.

But still, the term digital twin and all the implications, it's very broad term, right? So there is not really a strict definition that everything would fall into.

So I'm just questioning this.

Why can't we find the way how to include the BIM and 3D mesh model and point cloud into some kind of a version of digital twin?

Well, I think it's a huge part.

Like if you look at the digital twin consortium, the core part of the definition is a 3D representation of the physical asset world, whatever.

So it's there by default.

It is part of that ecosystem, but it isn't a digital twin on its own in that there is a maturity of levels of information that are brought in for decision process.

And at the end of the day, the hope of the digital twin is some sort of decision process, whether it be a predictive outcome, a simulated outcome or an automated outcome, that the information, once it's unified together, gives you a deeper understanding and it's more actionable.

So visualization on its own is really important.

To be honest, I had some heartburn with the term reality capture.

If you go back to 2014, 15, that term didn't exist.

And I was in the LIDAR space.

I worked for Farrow and for Trimble.

And the new term was reality capture, which lumped in photogrammetry and 360 tours with LIDAR.

And we were like, well, how dare you? We are a terrestrial LIDAR.

Don't group me with those other people.

You're going to dilute the value of the LIDAR.