3D
Building a city digital twin without the hype
What a useful digital twin actually needs: 3D Tiles, a clean data model, and a narrow first use case that the operations team cares about.
"Digital twin" has become a catch-all phrase. In practice, the successful projects we have shipped started small: one department, one question, one dataset that everyone agreed was authoritative.
Start with one decision
For a recent municipal client, that decision was where to prioritize street-tree planting for heat mitigation. We combined LiDAR-derived canopy, building footprints as 3D Tiles, and surface temperature into a single Cesium scene.
Grow from a solid model
Because the underlying data model was clean, adding drainage and mobility layers later took weeks, not months. That is the real payoff of a twin: compounding value from shared, trusted data.