Naver starts a smart city digital twin project in Saudi Arabia
The five-year initiative will use virtual reality to design Riyadh’s and four other large cities’ smart city infrastructure.
Building digital twin platforms for Riyadh and four other major cities in the Middle East is the aim of a five-year initiative initiated by the Saudi Arabian government and South Korean internet giant Naver Corp.
On Tuesday, Naver said that on July 21, it celebrated the inauguration of the digital twin platform project with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Municipal, Rural Affairs and Housing (MOMRAH) and the National Housing Company (NHC).
A digital twin is an electronic copy of a physical system or product that is used for testing, integration, simulation, and maintenance. Throughout a variety of sectors, including aircraft, automotive, construction, energy, and infrastructure, the technology is utilised to forecast opportunities or failures and get real-time data.
The proposal comes after Naver inked a $100 million agreement in October of last year to develop cloud-based platforms in Medina, Jeddah, Dammam, and Mecca, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Since then, on-site inspections, studies, and discussions have been used by the massive Korean web platform to build up plans for the project.
Naver plans to start mapping and three-dimensional (3D) modelling the five Saudi cities in order to create digital twin platforms.
The internet behemoth will collaborate on the project’s development with two Korean state-backed enterprises, Korea Land and Geospatial Informatix Corp. (LX) and Korea Water Resources Corp. (K-water), providing fundamental services including online natural catastrophe simulation and smart city infrastructure design.
According to a Naver official, Naver will look for excellent instances of the use of digital twin platforms throughout the project and investigate potential for technology-related value-added enterprises.
Naver is the owner of technologies that use artificial intelligence and aerial imagery to build virtual cities. Virtual reality, which is based on digital twin platforms, has an error margin of around 10 centimetres and is very accurate.
With the use of the company’s unique technology, which can reproduce reality in virtual space and a digital cloud that can process data steadily, the twin platform business may grow.
