Unity?and Microsoft?Combine Forces to?Create?Immersive Digital Twin?Learning Experiences with?Real-World Environments

Wind farms, with their massive equipment, spread out over a vast geographic area, exposed to the elements, present particularly challenging operational and maintenance requirements for their owners and operators. Sensors are needed to track vibration, temperature, foundation displacement, and wind eddy - and a regular maintenance schedule is required to keep everything running smoothly.  

As organizations shift to more proactive and predictive operations, high-value analysis is paramount, and must work from engineering teams to end users. This is where Digital Twins come in. A Digital Twin is a virtual digital replication of real-world objects and scenarios, whether that be a wind turbine, skyscraper, car, or the entire world. The value of a Digital Twin is that it enables simulation of any aspect of assets, environments, people, processes, and technologies. When a Digital Twin is connected to right-time data and facilitates, it creates the ability to enable automation and run simulations at scale, while also serving to bring together an ecosystem of systems and data, creating a data rich and consolidated environment to drive decision-making.   

This is exactly what Microsoft and Unity, the world’s leading platform for creating and operating interactive, real-time 3D content, partnered to do when they created a Microsoft Learning Module for developers with tools and processes to accelerate the development of complex IoT and Digital Twin solutions. The learning module illustrates how the partnership unlocks the next generation of solutions and experiences, by enabling the visualization of real-time IoT information, and deployment of experiences across devices like the Microsoft HoloLens 2.   

Based on a real customer scenario, the Microsoft Learning Module uses a HoloLens 2 (HL2) application to create a 3D virtual and immersive scene of a wind farm, demonstrating the relationships between the topography, turbine layout and data streams. HL2 provides an immersive experience, facilitating the exploration of a map, investigation of assets and their data, while popup windows highlight features of interest via eye movement of the use of hands to interact directly. Live telemetry data from simulated windmills is ingested into Azure Digital Twins from Azure IoT hub and used to drive real-time wind turbine operational data. This immersive MR experience was designed to enable collaboration between engineers and leadership, allowing frontline workers to use HL2 devices to optimize operations by correlating IoT data, weather, and geographical landscape data. 

For the Microsoft Learning Module, Unity’s real-time 3D development platform was used to create the Mixed Reality environment, providing tools that create the ability to move, rotate and scale a holographic object, eliminating the need to start from scratch and enable such manipulations. The Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) is a cross-platform toolkit for building mixed reality experiences for Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Virtual Reality (AVR). Together they provide a set of components and features that can be used to accelerate Windows Mixed Reality development. 

This contextual and visual learning module, with its ability to build and explore a virtual wind farm that collates data, provides a history of events and other activities, and gives a feeling for the health of the location, provides insights and experience to help developers create their own solutions with confidence and ease. 

 Check out the learn module at https://aka.ms/mslearn-mr-adt-unity