When XR meets digital twins: redrawing the conceptual map of extended reality

This perspective piece illustrates the synergy between digital twins and extended reality (XR) technologies and calls for their integration in future research. Through a brief example of the latest developments around Pokémon Go, this piece argues that digital twins and XR technologies share fundamental properties and a connected future trajectory. In turn, both stand to benefit from a mutual integration into one another’s conceptual repertoire, particularly at a time when digital twins are rapidly expanding, albeit with socio-cultural blind spots, and XR technologies have often not lived up to their corporate hype, leaving the field in search of new, meaningful directions. Furthermore, as this article is part of a special issue that focuses on ‘meaningful XR’ (interpreted as moving XR research beyond games and gaming), it also reflects briefly upon the very notion of what makes XR ‘meaningful’, as well as how the synergy between digital twins and XR complicates this concept.