SIEMENS

Duplicate World. As office buildings, wind parks, power plants, roads, bridges (think Google Street View) and even private homes are added to the virtual landscape, a digital duplicate of the real world is being pieced together. Add to that the fact that an ever-growing spectrum of products and components is being developed there as well, and you have the potential for something called "crowd sourcing" — the idea that content authoring in the digital world is so distributed that it comes from everywhere. "If you’re planning a new solar thermal installation, why not test it out on the virtual world’s copy of the local utility’s transmission network before you build it?" asks Genc. "There’s no need to reinvent the wheel."
What’s more, as computing power and the level of detail in simulations continues to grow, information fusion in the digital world will come to include not just the physical characteristics and appearances of objects, but their functional ones as well. Data on heat and fluid dynamics, radiation, fatigue, and electromagnetic characteristics, for instance (see box), may be available on the virtual versions of everything from hearing aid components to auto parts, thus opening a new kind of economy in which virtual products are optimized for each other in terms of dozens of factors.

Me, Myself or My Avatar? Just as models of inanimate objects are becoming hyper-real through simulation of a widening spectrum of characteristics, human biology is coming into sharper focus — with amazing implications when applied to the virtual world. "There is an analogy between manufacturing cells and human cells," says CT Head Reinhold Achatz, a specialist in automation; "and my expectation is that as we approach a deeper understanding of biology, we will be able to model the human body down to the cellular, and perhaps even the genetic level — much as we model materials on the molecular level today."
At Siemens, that process is already well under way. "Over the next few years, we expect to be able to model the human heart, for instance, in terms of factors such as morphology, dynamics, electro-mechanics, tissue, myocytes, ion channels, and molecular profiles," says Dorin Comaniciu, PhD, head of SCR’s Integrated Data Systems Department. "But what is most important in all of this is that as we combine macro, micro and nano-levels of knowledge, the information will be personalized. That’s where the value for patient and physician becomes clear."
Value indeed. Think electronic patient files that contain up-to-date — albeit vastly simplified — functional models of their namesakes’ circulatory systems, livers, etc. Want to know how a particular combination of agents will affect the treatment of your arrhythmia? Run a simulation on your avatar — not on yourself. That’s the future. "If we build models all the way out to molecular profiles, we will be able to answer questions predictively in the virtual world with a high level of accuracy," says Comaniciu.
And what about training for surgical emergencies? As is the case for pilots, there’s no safer place for surgeons to earn their wings than in the virtual world. "99 % of surgeons’ time is routine. But it’s that one-in-a-million emergency that demands 100 % of a team’s expertise," says Dr. Frank Sauer, head of the Imaging and Visualization Department at SCR. "That’s the emergency you can train for over and over again in the virtual world." Now all that’s needed are a few willing avatars!