Virtual Urban Analysis Using A Digital Twin Approach

The growing urban population has engendered new conflicts in urban design. Although there are many traditional solutions to overcome many uprising problems, computer-aided solutions can provide rapid and intelligent outcomes. In this paper, a virtual environment is designed aiming to serve as a part of a digital twin platform with realistic features and methods to address some common problems in urban planning, such as visibility, energy efficiency, and heat islands. The simulator is built in Unity3D due to its immersive visualization capability. The virtual environment can provide quantitative and visual assessment in four main features, which are landmark visibility, sky exposure, shadow variation, and light intensity, respectively. Through the analysis with these methods, it is shown that the placement of the surrounding buildings and their heights influence the visibility index of the target object. Additionally, sky exposure at a given location depends largely on surrounding structures, and increasing open areas leads to a notable rise in the sky exposure index. On the other hand, with the light intensity measurement in the digital environment, heat island locations can be estimated.