From Apollo 13 to empty plots: My 25 years living inside the Digital Twin.

Everyone seems to be talking about digital twins right now. Construction companies, automotive brands, urban planners, government agencies — they're all suddenly discovering this remarkable technology. And I find myself smiling. Not because I want to claim credit for anything. But because I've been living inside this world for over two decades, and watching it finally arrive at the mainstream feels a little like seeing a film in the cinema that you read the book for years ago.

Let me tell you the full story. Starting not with me, but with three astronauts 200,000 miles from home.

Houston, We Have a Problem — And a Solution

The concept of the digital twin was not born in a Silicon Valley lab in 2015. It was born in a crisis.

In April 1970, Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded early into the mission. The crew was in mortal danger, further from Earth than any human had ever been, and engineers at NASA had to find a way to bring them home.

Their secret weapon was something extraordinary for its time: a suite of physical simulators on the ground that mirrored the spacecraft in space.

By feeding real-time data from the stricken ship into those simulations, engineers could test procedures, model scenarios and develop rescue plans — without risking the lives of the crew. It was the world's first digital twin. Nobody called it that at the time, but that's exactly what it was.

The concept gained its formal name decades later. In 2002, Dr. Michael Grieves introduced the idea at the University of Michigan in the context of product lifecycle management — a virtual representation of a physical product, with data flowing in both directions between the real and the digital. And then in 2010, NASA engineer John Vickers gave it the term we use today: the digital twin. What had been a concept, an instinct, a survival mechanism in 1970, now had a name and a definition.

But here's the thing nobody talks about. In the years between Apollo and the boardroom, there was a whole industry quietly doing this work. My industry. The world of CGI.

A Ford Engine on the Cover of a Magazine

The year was 2000. I was running a project for Ford Motor Company — a detailed cutaway image of their new Duratorq diesel engine. The brief was to create something technically precise, visually stunning, and worthy of the cover of Automobiltechnische Zeitschrift, one of the most respected automotive engineering publications in the world. We delivered. The image made the front cover.

Think about what that project actually was. We built a complete, photorealistic, three-dimensional digital model of a physical engine — every component, every tolerance, every surface — before most people had even heard the phrase "digital twin." We could interrogate it from any angle, section through it, animate its working parts, and communicate engineering complexity in a way that no photograph of a physical object could.

My first Digital Twin had been born. We just called it 'car in the garage', a play on the idea of building a virtual photo unit and having it in the garage ready to take on location and photograph.

And it was only the beginning. 

Every Product Category You Can Imagine

Over the next decade and more, I led projects spanning virtually every physical product category you can think of. Planes. Trains. Mobile phones and computers. White goods — washing machines, refrigerators, ovens.

Watches and jewellery. Gyms and Offices. Whisky glasses and coffee machines. Cars across multiple brands. Each one involved the same fundamental challenge: build a precise, beautiful, interrogatable digital version of a physical thing, and use it to communicate, sell, demonstrate, or explain. 

The outputs varied enormously. Still images for press and marketing. Fully animated films showing how products worked. Interactive configurators allowing customers to customise a product in real time. Immersive experiences that placed a viewer inside the engine, the cabin, the living room that hadn't been built yet.

The technology evolved around us. Render times dropped. Realism improved. Interactivity became possible where once there had only been linear output. But the underlying philosophy was always the same: the digital version of the thing is as important as the physical thing itself. In some cases, it comes first. We were supporting product reveals, pre sales targets and Prototype evaluations, all before a fully finished product was available.

This is something that the broader business world is only now beginning to understand.

The Gaming Industry Changes Everything

About ten years ago, something shifted. The games industry — which had been quietly developing some of the most sophisticated real-time rendering technology in the world — began to leak into ours.

I brokered one of the first collaborations between Epic Games and a CGI studio outside of the games world.

At the time, Unreal Engine was still thought of as something that powered shooters and open-world adventures. The idea of using it to visualise a product, an environment, or a building in real time felt radical. It wasn't — it was obvious, if you were paying attention. The quality was extraordinary. The interactivity was extraordinary. And crucially, the real-time capability meant that for the first time you could genuinely respond to a viewer's choices, move through a space dynamically, and experience a product the way you would in the physical world. 

That collaboration produced something remarkable. You can see a flavour of the work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRQtcV98II

The broader adoption of Unreal Engine and real-time rendering outside of gaming didn't happen overnight.

But it did happen — and it has fundamentally reshaped what is possible with digital twins.

The gap between what you can visualise in the digital world and what exists in the physical world has effectively closed.

Selling Homes That Don't Exist Yet

The most recent chapter of my digital twin journey takes me into the construction industry — and it might be the most exciting of all.

I've been leading a team using digital twin technology to help developers, planners and housebuilders visualise, plan and sell developments that are two years away from being built. We are creating entire towns in digital space. Streets, buildings, apartments, communal areas, views from specific windows. We allow potential buyers to walk through their future home. We allow local authorities to interrogate a development in context. We allow sales and leasing teams to close deals on units that are nothing but ground and ambition.

This isn't a gimmick. The construction industry has traditionally been one of the slowest to adopt digital technology — and it has paid the price in cost overruns, communication failures, and projects that disappoint because nobody truly understood what they were buying into. Digital twins change that equation completely. When every stakeholder can see, explore and interrogate the same digital model, alignment happens faster, decisions improve, and the final physical product is much more likely to match the vision.

The industry is starting to catch up with this reality. The tools are maturing. The clients are ready. And the teams who can deliver this work at scale — who understand not just the technology but the storytelling, the human factors, the commercial pressures — are in very short supply.

What Comes Next?

I've been doing this long enough to be sceptical of hype cycles. But I'm not sceptical about digital twins. The direction of travel is clear, and it points somewhere genuinely transformative.

We are moving from digital twins that visualise to digital twins that think. The integration of AI into these models means they aren't just reflect reality — they are predicting it. They identify where a structure is likely to fail before it fails. They model how pedestrians will move through a new development before a single brick is laid. They personalise an experience to each viewer in real time, drawing on data about who they are and what they care about.

We are also moving from individual product twins to systems twins — digital representations not just of a building, but of an entire city. Not just of an engine, but of an entire supply chain. The scale is expanding dramatically, and the opportunities that creates for smarter decision-making are enormous.

And we are moving, most significantly, from a world where digital twins are an optional enhancement to one where they are a contractual expectation.

Clients — whether they're buying a car, commissioning a building, or planning a public space — will increasingly expect to experience their investment in digital form before any physical work begins. The studios and teams who can deliver that experience convincingly will define the next decade of this industry.

I've had 25 years of practice. I'm looking forward to the next 25.

By Richard Wright