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From the roiling surface of the sun to the arteries of the human heart, from flood-prone city streets to cathedral vaults, digital twins are quietly becoming one of the most consequential technologies of our time. At their core, digital twins are high-fidelity virtual replicas of physical systems that are continually updated with real-world data. As they can be probed, simulated, and stress-tested safely, they are changing how we predict, plan, and protect.
Below is a tour of varied, real-world uses, spanning space science, healthcare, national planning, cultural heritage, oceans, and natural hazards—and why this matters now.
A Digital Twin for Our Star: Faster Warnings from the Sun
On August 20, 2025, IBM and NASA introduced Surya, a foundation model trained on nine years of observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). SDO has captured high-resolution solar images every 12 seconds since 2010, across multiple wavelengths, along with magnetic field measurements that reveal how energy moves through the Sun’s layers.1
Surya’s breakthrough isn’t just scale—it’s how it learns. By unifying disparate sensor feeds and using long-range vision transformers, plus an optimization called spectral gating to filter noise, the model learns directly from raw data rather than waiting on labor-intensive labels. In early tests, Surya extended solar-flare warning lead time from about one hour to roughly two, while improving flare classification accuracy.2 Those extra minutes matter: major flares and coronal events can disrupt power grids, satellites, GPS, and global communications. A continuously updated “twin” of the Sun moves us from after-the-fact analysis to actionable early warning.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) & Digital Twins for Construction
The Shard, London
In London’s iconic Shard, a BIM-driven digital twin supported the project from its earliest stages through to day-to-day building management. The process began with detailed mapping of the site using photogrammetry and LiDAR, ensuring the tower would integrate smoothly with its urban setting. During construction, the model streamlined scheduling, coordinated logistics, and flagged potential problems before they escalated. Today, it continues to serve facility managers by providing real-time visibility into structural elements and MEP systems, keeping operations efficient and reliable.3
The Wright Museum
The Wright Museum adopted a Scan-to-BIM workflow, using laser scanners to generate a detailed point cloud of the facility. The data was processed in Autodesk Recap to create a mesh, forming the basis for a Revit model. This model provided both 2D plans and a comprehensive 3D foundation for the museum’s digital twin. Autodesk Tandem then ingested the Revit model, linking assets with facility management data. IoT sensors were integrated—measuring CO₂, humidity, temperature, and proximity—with insights visualized through charts and heatmaps within the digital twin.4
A Nation’s Digital Twin: Singapore’s Living Model for Smarter Cities
Two decades ago, the idea of aircraft and vehicles laser-scanning an entire country sounded like sci-fi. Today, Virtual Singapore is a high-detail, shareable 3D twin used across agencies for planning, asset management, and resilience.5
Born partly from the need to mitigate damaging flash floods and optimize scarce land, the project fuses BIM-enabled 3D laser scanning, street-level scans, and imagery into one platform. With it, planners can:
- Analyze runoff and storm impacts to target flood defenses.
- Test transport flows and pedestrian patterns to prevent bottlenecks.
- Map network coverage to place towers and power lines intelligently.
- Coordinate across departments using a common, up-to-date picture of above- and below-ground assets (with a national subsurface twin underway).
Two design choices make it especially powerful: technical fidelity and openness. By sharing data and tools across public, private, and research sectors, Singapore turns the twin into an innovation commons—where lessons compound rather than fragment.
Similar city modeling was used for the 2024 Paris Olympics to support efficient renovations around the Eiffel Tower and broader urban improvements.
Heritage at Millimeter Scale: Notre-Dame’s 3D BIM Digital Twin Lifeline
When fire devastated Notre-Dame de Paris in 2019, a 2015 laser-scan campaign by the late art historian Andrew Tallon became a lifeline. His billion-point, five-millimeter-accurate 3D BIM model captured geometry that blueprints never held: every rib, tracery, and twist accumulated across centuries.6
Such a digital twin, powered by laser scanning and BIM, enables engineers to:
- Scan and reconstruct with millimeter accuracy.
- Run structural simulations (e.g., in Ansys, Grasshopper) to study load distribution and where reinforcement is prudent.
- Recreate light and acoustics digitally so the restored cathedral can feel—not just look—right.
Heritage digital twins do more than rebuild; they preserve experience—the luminous wash through stained glass, the reverberation under vaults—while planning for a changing climate.
The Heart (and Body) as a Digital Twin: Toward Truly Personal Medicine
The idea of the heart, and eventually the whole body, as a digital twin is bringing medicine closer to truly personal care—living virtual models synchronized with one’s physiology, environment, and medical history.
At Johns Hopkins’ Trayanova Lab, for instance, clinicians already create patient-specific heart models a week before procedures like atrial fibrillation ablation, rehearsing virtually to identify problem areas and plan interventions that promise higher success rates and fewer complications. Looking ahead, researchers envision digital twins running virtual trials of treatment options, drug dosages, and combinations before a patient receives a single pill or procedure.7
Why Digital Twins Matter
Enable Proactive Problem Solving
Twins shift us from diagnosing aftermaths to anticipating impacts and shaping outcomes—be it flare alerts, ablation targets, flood defenses, or evacuation routes.
Availability of Shared Information
A single, living model becomes the meeting ground for stakeholders who once worked off mismatched maps and spreadsheets. This means reduced clashes and conflicts, increased accountability and visibility, and data-driven decision-making.
Tailor-Made Solutions
Digital twins promise decisions tuned to a problem’s specific circumstances—from the whims of our Sun to BIM-enabled replicas that predict clashes and model energy performance. In health especially, twins point to personalized therapies for one patient’s biology and context, not a cohort mean.
The Bottom Line
Digital twins are not sci-fi; they are here, quietly making our systems safer, smarter, and fairer—from the Sun that powers our planet to the reefs and cities that sustain us, the cathedrals that anchor our culture, the hearts that keep us alive, and the volcanoes that remind us who is boss. As the tooling matures and the cost to build and update twins drops, expect more “what-if” questions to be asked—and answered—before we act in the physical world.
The future won’t just be built; it’ll be simulated first.
