Amsterdam ZuidasDOK: A Digital Twin Platform Built on UE 5.4 | Unreal Fest 2024
Hello, everybody. My name is Jules. I'm the owner of Vero, and I have Rustam here with me, the chief innovation officer, and further, the lead tech. Yeah, and let's say we will give a little bit of an introduction, of course, of how we got to working so much with Unreal. A lot of nice, I think, different cases from city level till residential interior level. So if there's any questions, we have a quite clear split up of 20 minutes of just presentation, 20 minutes of demo, and just during the demo and everything, let's keep it interactive, so.
Yeah. So we are really focused on the world of the built environment. We started back in the day, really as an architectural visualization company.
And right now what we try to do is really to take a look at how can we accelerate the unbuild, so that is all the way from acquisition till the moment that a building is delivered. But also there right now with data integration for digital twins, more and more, we are taking a look at how can we extend that even so the value proposition becomes even bigger. We started in 2016, as a purely old school visualization company with a couple of guys in 3DS Max, but very quickly understood that there is a big gap between what is possible, technically in the world, and also what are the needs and how to fill that gap within the architectural sphere.
But also dove quite quickly to the developers to take a look at commercial solutions. So yeah, we have a company of around 45, 50 people, very wide spread, and yeah, spread all over Europe. We love nature, as you can see. And that's also where we get a lot of our inspiration. One of our first projects, I'll show you later, was a very big green tower in Amsterdam. And then we were also forced to dive into greenery in the 3D sphere, because to do that kind of building in an old fashioned way was not really possible.
So, yeah, our client base is really all around the world. I would say 30% Europe, 30%, 40% US, and the rest in the Middle East. And some of the clients we work with, you see a good mix of architects and developers, and we really like that combination because they have different kind of needs, you know? And that also teaches us different. And the nice thing about working worldwide is that each location in the world teaches us a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at real estate, a different way of how to interact with clients, how to interact with stakeholders.
And therefore, we are constantly updating from these learnings into new features. This is pretty much what I just said. So yeah, let's just dive into the products. All the products that you'll see today, they're all Unreal based.
And what we do is of course, real time applications, but within stakeholder management, within decision making, getting content to the masses is sometimes more critical than just having very, very good quality. So we also developed our own web products. Then Rustam will probably dive into path tracing and lumen, and then also afterwards in the case for the Zuidasdok, which is this case, we will see some data visualization. So this was that-- how do I-- here, one second. This is that project that it's built now. But that was in 2016, one of our first projects.
And we were asked by the city hall of Amsterdam, there is the financial district of Amsterdam, to make for their information center a digital twin. And we just started first with a visual twin. What I understand the difference between a visual twin and digital twin is the data component. And the visual twin is purely, let's say, for stakeholder engagement. But this is actually, I think, one of the, if not the biggest infrastructure project of the Netherlands, because it's actually about this whole transportation hub.
But from there, because we had this beautiful project all the way in the beginning, in 2016, at one point we already made a commercial tool for them. We had a vision, OK, let's just put the whole financial district in Unreal. And we had some discussion about it, about investments we would have to do and everything. But it actually worked out very well because as you will probably see later, there's also some cases we will see.
But right now we have 13 or 14 ongoing projects, all at different stages-- like delivered. We're now taking a look at how can we do the facility management integration. This one is now a remodeling. This one is new here. Next to it is new. Yeah, there is a residential project there.
This one we're doing feasibility studies and simulations. So very big difference. There's here on the left, the residential one. We're taking a look right now at how can we simulate the heatmap differences of the impact of the green roofs. So more and more it starts to really become a platform.
And right now also for our next step, that's what we are at the moment raising funding for, to really make it a platform, because this is not the only location we have. We have locations in Florida, in the US, parts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that are all highly developed. Eindhoven, we have right now around this area. And what we want is not to focus on the build only, but about integrating the built and the unbuilt together in one, and being able to see how are we shaping cities of the future, because that's in the end, on city level-- what is the interesting part is that you can actually see how to integrate what will come and how will it match with the ideas that are coming, they're now in tenders and acquisitions, et cetera. So this is a new project. It's this one.
And, yeah. Also here we build already the whole setting in Unreal. So then we first integrate a volume model. They can see how it works. We can work with the finalized model and then we create a full commercial tool for them where, you can see here, it's a touch application.
So for us, there is here a CRM integration. This is still for the commercial phase. So it's not yet for facility manager because not built yet. We can integrate any kind of bim data in here.
There is real time weather simulations, light, everything that you want. So the beautiful thing is how we always try to explain to clients is, the beautiful thing is that everything is possible. But the downside is that everything is possible. So we always need to take a look with them, OK, what is it actually what you need and how do we get towards a product? And of course, we have developed throughout the years a set amount of features, like a set that we integrate from around the world. But this is actually-- we already created this for them in the moment when they were still in communication with the municipality and they even said it themselves that it really accelerated their whole process at least a couple of months, because the municipality had a question about exactly what we're going to take a look right now on the left side about the light fall. And they all said, like, if I would have to do it with traditional rendering, make a new-- make an understanding of how this is going to work and everything with the light fall, yeah, it would have-- I had to outsource it again.
And right now I just said to the municipality, OK, drop by. They went to their touch screen. The municipality walked through it themselves, understood everything themselves. And you know about stakeholder engagement.
It's a very powerful tool to give people the control, and therefore the feeling that they that they understand everything from their perspective. Anything to add? I will add afterwards when I will show the actual demo. Good. So [INAUDABLE] we are right now just delivered a web tool for them.
This is for a remodeling for the owner of the building. So we created a web experience. So in collaboration with the owner and the real estate agent. And this is a web-- you see just a screen recording of web. But also there, we are integrating any kind of data set that is relevant to that client. This is one of the basic features that we have for web use.
And then this is for commercial real estate. But of course, for residential real estate, it looks totally different. And then we can take these kind of extracts from Unreal quite quickly and cost efficient for client, because in the end, you want to go towards a point where everything is built in Unreal, from our point of view, because the amount of content you can extract from it, that's in the end, also from-- we are living in an attention world, and the attention world is all about how many impressions can you generate. So amount of content therefore is very critical. Yeah, these kind of shots, they're more rendered out, of course. But these kind of tools.
Then a step smaller, again. It's for a single family home developer in the United States in California. And we made a real time application for pretty much helping their customers understand what they're ordering. We can integrate it with their ERP system, because this whole house is wood skeleton, and directly communicated and prefabricated with the factory. So all changes that are in bim will be changed in Unreal, and all changes that are made in Unreal are communicated with the CRM application.
So the factory knows what to order for the client. And it works very well. So this is one of their main tools right now that they can use in the commercial process. They're developing-- this is a standard house.
We've done it also for developer in the Netherlands, where we put all their standard houses in Unreal. And yeah, you can make it as crazy as integrating a finance tool, where, because that client in the Netherlands has their own finance department. And then the configuration attributes that you have, have a direct result into your monthly cost on the mortgage that they can also take. So it's all about integrating into one experience, the whole unbuild process from the moment of acquisition, planning, approval, commercial, and then delivery, and all from one source of truth, in a way. So whether it's from city scale to the configuration of your sofa, we built it all in Unreal. And as I always say is, I don't do much.
I'm the chief entertainment officer. So the guys here, they do everything. So that's why I will leave them now to do it. Yeah. OK. I will open the application.
Yeah, actually, about this shot. I just want to add-- why it doesn't work? Yeah. So this is our first try when we use Lumen as a technology. I remember it was like, two years ago the once Epic Games revealed the Lumen technology.
We're like, start trying this. And this is our first shot with Lumen made. Of course, there was some flickering and some small issues in reflection, et cetera. But yeah, for the first try we were really, really like the result with it. And right now, of course we get really deeper and much forward, because we know how to tweak and with the lights and make the better result. But yeah, still we remember this shot. It looks really like a movie.
And the Lumen technology was really a big step forward for us. Yeah, I'm going to show you the application. We were [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, this one. Sorry.
Yeah. So this is a digital twin we've been talking about for commercial district of Amsterdam. As you can see, we have a best ability to navigate through the whole district and to see it from the really eye bird aerial view from a city perspective and up to a high level view. So we've been collecting the assets while working on different projects in this district.
And once we come up to idea to create this visual twin and then digital twin, we've been faced a different issues with how to integrate all this enormous amount of assets that we create from different software. We were preparing some in Maya and Blender and 3D Max, et cetera, et cetera. And for us, it was really to find this balance between good performance and high quality visual thing, and to have everything in one, it was quite big challenge. But once we-- Epic Games revealed this nanotechnology, for us, it was really, really big step further, and especially for greenery.
This here, you see a lot of greenery we've been at. And I remember that project we done for India, and was one of our first digital twin project. And there was building that covered with the whole greenery. And once we integrate all the assets into Unreal engine, everything was really crushing.
So [INAUDIBLE] technology for us, it's a big step forward. And also, Lumen right now, because right now for us, especially this project, I call it, is like one jar. We have everything in one, and we can use-- why we really so obsessed with Unreal, because we have possibility to use everything and to create different products from one scene. We can make this digital real time application for marketing. We can create a cool animation, we can create with path tracing, we can create cool still images that are already shown.
And also we use it for web approach. So we render with path tracing the sequence of images and make it with a web technology, we made a web solution. So it's rather depends on what client needs.
So speaking about this application. Yeah, we have the whole districts. Like we can have like time simulation. We have different types of transport, because the whole-- the first idea of this particular application was to show the whole Zuidasdok which is this one of the biggest hub of Amsterdam, and to show the different transport routes.
Yeah. And also-- yeah. I will show-- yeah. But also we have a possibility to walk around the corner, and we can walk through the station itself. So Lumen technology gives us an opportunity to have everything in one scene and with a really high quality of visualization.
Right now this app have been set up in a informational center for Zuidasdok, which is, I believe, in this building. So once you are in Amsterdam, you can go there and see how it works in real life. Yeah. So you can walk through the station, see actually how the station will look like. See the simulation of trains, how they're coming and arriving. You can walk from one side to another.
Yeah. So beside that, one of the next step, what we are working right now is-- second. I believe this one. Yeah. So the next step that we're working right now is data visualization.
So data visualizations we see is the biggest challenge and the biggest, like, the main thing that we will need to implement in our application. So right now, we already made some first tries. We had access to some data of energy consumption of different plots within the south part of Amsterdam.
We visualize it. We can also see how their energy-- so each color represents-- it's in Dutch-- but it represents the type of energy consumption within this part of the district. And yeah, you can see how it was changed throughout the time.
And right now we are all about thinking how to create. We have our first tries of using real time data. And for us, it will be the most important achievement for the next years. We are looking forward also what Epic Games will reveal and how to make this application more efficient for city scale development. Yeah. Yeah, let me also add.
So what we in the end want to achieve is, that through the data, like I said already, for instance, here in the bottom you see there is this project, is that it will be, in the end, a drag and drop experience for clients, where they, at every different stage, can integrate their model. But also experience CO2 simulation. How does the, for instance, here we were talking about, OK, how does the garage potentially would work? How does the CO2 buildup work, and then what is the traffic flow simulation. All these kind of simulation processes by pretty much mixing the build and the unbuild into one. That's, let's say, our goal, and also where we believe that the value will be added the most in the next couple of years.
Because you still see a very big variety from people still delivering projects not even in bim, especially worldwide. And right now the nice thing is that you have one source of truth where you can all communicate together, and therefore accelerate the whole process in understanding what you're working for, what you're working towards, and what also should the result be looking like, you know? Do we have another or is this the-- No, we have only this one. But yeah, maybe also I want to add right now we are what we are looking at for the future steps is also like right now, we have this [INAUDIBLE] technology, and we also trying right now to implement its [INAUDIBLE] sync that right now you see that one of the part is more detailed in terms of all things and assets on the background are like, lower detail.
But we were also want to have everything in more highly detailed level that we are trying to do to-- that we are trying right now to make it happen and we are looking also forward. We assume that Epic Games that will solve this also in the future. So that would be like, really cool thing that the biggest scale of the city part will be in a high resolution and highly detailed. So it's to represent the whole the city view in a very cool way.
Yeah. [APPLAUSE]
2024-07-28 10:39
