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Singapore will soon have a 'virtual twin city' that reflects everything in the real world

Virtual Singapore 1
Dassault Systemes

There is no better place to live out your dreams of being mayor than in the confines of SimCity. But as accurate as the latest version of the beloved city planning game is, it's still pretty useless for real-life planners.

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Not so with Virtual Singapore, an insanely realistic virtual model of the city-state that looks like SimCity if the game represented a real place.

Currently in development with 3D design software giant Dassault Systèmes and the Prime Minister's Office in Singapore, Virtual Singapore incorporates all sorts of data — including climate, demographics, energy consumption, building elevation, and even the location of trees —to create a virtual version of the urban area that can be used to figure out the impact of everything from an influx of wind energy to better disaster management planning.

"You can click on a building and see the surface of its roof, how much electricity it consumes," Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systèmes, tells Tech Insider. "You can simulate how in the event of a gas leak or a bombing, the population could escape based on where people are. We have simulation engines for this."

Here's a look at Virtual Singapore in action:

The idea for the project originally came from the city-state's overwhelming amount of data, much of which lived in siloed platforms. Dassault Systèmes took Singapore's legacy data and turned it into a 3-D version of the urban area (or a "digital twin city," as the company calls it).

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Eventually, Charlès imagines that Virtual Singapore will incorporate data from citizens — information from cars and fitness trackers, for example. 

Some (but not all) of this data will be available to citizens. Singapore is still working out what that might look like. 

Virtual Singapore will be finished by 2018.  And that's just the start.

Dassault Systèmes hopes to work with other cities on similar platforms — including new Chinese cities are that are still under construction. If a new city has data from a Virtual Singapore-like platform, the theory goes, it could do a better job of planning neighborhoods that have yet to be built.

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"The core objective is to rethink the city." says Charlès.

 

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