Carolina Cruz-Neira has become a highly sought-after expert on digital twins.
And for good reason.
The interim director of UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training’s history with the technology started long before it became the buzzword that it is today.
Cruz-Neira has worked at Kennedy Space Center and in widely varied industries such as pest control, avionics, and marine biology.
On Thursday, she took the stage at the first-ever Reality Capture Network conference in Orlando.
She said seeing how widely this crucial technology has become adopted helps her push through any sort of exhaustion.
“The fact that digital twins is bringing a lot of communities together has re-energized me,” she said.
The conference has brought together experts in a number of critical fields, including air travel, energy and automotive.
The goal has been to share the impact digital twins have had on these fields, especially considering how prolific the field has become.
Cruz-Neira, who has worked with digital twins for decades, said the timing of its popularity has come because of a convergence of several technologies’ maturity.
These include visualization techniques, artificial intelligence and hardware that can handle the output.
“We can do a lot in real time that we could not do before, it’s amazing,” she said. “An event like this is important because now we need to figure out how to stitch all of that into a coherent single thing.”
As technology advances, the number of people who adopt virtual and augmented reality grows, as well.
By 2030, the market is expected to swell to more than $450 billion.
That rise will coincide with an expansion of those who veer into digital twins, a technology semi-reliant on seamless experiences that bring a user into the “twin.”
“We kind of got complacent for a very long time where we would expect certain technology advancements and they wouldn’t happen,” said Caris Baker, a senior technical artist in Orlando. “Now, things are happening so quickly because of better access, better processing and better hardware.”
Baker said the capabilities of technology now can produce what was once just an idea.
“A lot of this was all science fiction at one point,” she said. “Now the hardware has caught up with it so we can actually accomplish some of those things.”
The conference at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts downtown featured a large speaker room and a corridor of mostly local businesses showing off their wares.
Justin Spears has been a tech community advocate and investor in Orlando for years.
Spears’ company M3D Technologies was on the floor showing off its own experiential tech.
He said the conference’s decision to show up in Orlando should have been a no-brainer.
“We see such a huge influx of digital twin development here,” he said. “This conference belongs here. Reality capture belongs here. It’s an epic move to see R-Con here in Orlando for the first time.”
As she wound down from her morning discussion of how digital twins represent the intersection of several technologies, Cruz-Neira paced the floor, talking about technology and Orlando’s role in it.
She said perhaps one of the biggest missing pieces in the discussion has been collaboration.
Now, however, there is more of an “open door” policy on sharing information and progress.
For Cruz-Neira, the attraction to digital twins has always been about problem solving.
“I am always looking for big, big challenges and big, big problems,” she said. “Digital twins is the big, big problem to solve right now. We all get to build on our experiences, our skills but, at the same time, it gets us out of our comfort zone because now we have to address real challenges.”