Finding tools that drive efficient, smart city planning is now more important than ever. Itron Idea Labs partnered with Microsoft and Vectorform to create the first-ever HoloLens experience connected with the Azure Digital Twin platform.

 

This experience provides users with an immersive means to visualize and interact with a 2D map with 3D holograms to demonstrate real-time impacts of the changes they were testing. Neighborhood improvements could impact energy usage, air quality, and ambient temperature. In the years leading up to the 2028 Olympics hosted in Los Angeles, the experience would allow city planners to experiment with proposed solutions, shifting a global stigma of smog and pollution to an emerging leader in clean air.

Goals

Architect for future enhancement flexibility

Establish a base framework for CES 2019, with expectations to include expansions for visualizing bike lanes, planting trees, EV charging, and rooftop painting.

Establish a scalable framework for reuse

Accommodate evolving content for new cities or neighborhoods, each using the same platform with specific needs to suit their communities.

Utilize Real-Time Data

Provide real time feedback from the digital twin on changes being made to the environment to validate experiments against KPIs.

Results

Cities of the future will have a digital twin.

Itron Idea Lab ushers in a new era of smart city, giving city planners new tools to plan, experiment, and validate financial and environmental impact of upgrades to their community. After demonstration at CES 2019, Itron has been demonstrated this vision as a featured guest, including the Microsoft booth at DistribuTECH 2019, the city of Los Angeles, and showcased at Itron Utility week.

At Itron Idea Labs, we are exploring groundbreaking concepts by using emerging technologies, such as augmented reality, to realize new and bold solutions. We are excited to combine our vision with Microsoft's technology for incredible simulations at CES.

Roberto Aiello, director, Itron Idea Labs

Image recognition

The experience spawns a 3D holographic overlay of a neighborhood using seamless image recognition.

Utilized street
sensor data

The holographic overlay is accompanied by a simulated infrastructure of Itron smart city equipment, to provide street level sensor data within the digital twin simulations.

Providing value through transparency

Experience the value and importance of energy and environmental initiatives and the infrastructure upgrades required to track them. By providing valuable information Itron builds a relationship and trust with City planners.

Spectator view

In order to expand the impact of the first-person experience, we enabled a spectator view for an improved larger audience setting. Spectator view enables for a presenter to cast from the HoloLens to an iPad (single spectator) and Apple TV (spectator group).

The city of the future demands improvement; for the environment, for the residents. With the cloud architecture of Azure Digital Twin and the presentation capabilities of Microsoft HoloLens, Itron Idea Labs has taken great steps forward in arming city planners and government officials with the capability to test and validate proposed improvements.

Roles

  • Strategy
  • UX/UI Design
  • HoloLens Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Project Management

Deliverables

  • Deployment for HoloLens
  • Deployment for iOS

Concentrations

In the press

ZD.net covers the Itron Idea Labs HoloLens Experience at CES 2019 with the article ‘Microsoft Azure Digital Twins is like SimCity’.

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Work

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