By: Martin Halbersma

At The Imagineers we enjoy working with other companies, institutions and schools. We have a great collaboration with the latter group with the NHL Stenden in Leeuwarden, and last semester (Sept 2022 / January 2023) we explored the world of Digital Twins together with 2 groups of students from the Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) course. may discover.

The background:
We can bring anything to life visually. Using the latest techniques, we try to bring our stakeholders closer together by presenting an honest (preferably realistic) picture of changes in the physical environment.

We like to think ahead, innovate and look in the digital world around us for opportunities to make our products more beautiful, interesting, smarter and clear. 1 of these options is Visual Twinning: a digital, interactive environment that tells our customer's story. What exactly this story is depends on the customer, but these often involve changes that take place in the living environment.

We ended up with Unreal Engine: a package that gives us the options to take our projects to a higher (nicer, faster, clearer) and more interactive level. But that also raised a question: how should we approach this? Figuring this out, finding applications and coming up with ideas takes time. And that is why we asked the CMD students this question:

How do we make a Digital Twin more lively for issues surrounding area development, so that potential changed situations appeal more to the imagination, thereby increasing recognition?

The question:
9 students, divided into two groups, were enthusiastic to answer this question for us. So we gave them two different assignments:

To group 1: Create an interactive Online Visitor Center.
To group 2: Come up with a fictional project in spatial planning and add interactivity and liveliness to it.
There were some points of interest:

• The environments should be lively
• The environments must be interactive
• The project had to be set up based on Unreal Engine.

The content, manner and approach were free to the students.

Collaboration:
In my role as internship supervisor, I was the contact person for the students within The Imagineers. I supervised the contact moments, answered their questions, provided feedback and translated the wishes from the company. What followed was a fun and educational collaboration, experienced from both sides. The fact that we as a company are familiar with the digital world, modern techniques and the development of digital products made communication easier for both parties. We are familiar with the terminology used and understand how projects are set up. At the same time, it posed an extra challenge for the students. Because we are so familiar with the digital world, we set the bar extra high for them, which allowed us to be quite critical at times.

Although the collaboration ultimately went well, one of the groups encountered a motivation problem due to miscommunication. This resulted in a heated discussion in which the teachers were also involved as mediators. The incident did ensure that the collaboration went better in the second part of the period, and the group of students recovered very well to produce a nice end product.

Result:
The result is twofold.
Firstly, we, as a company, have gained beautiful and new insights and ideas that we can ultimately apply in our products. We have gained more insight into the (im)possibilities and the challenges that still lie ahead of us. In addition, the close collaboration with CMD has strengthened our ties with the program.

The students have indicated that by challenging them in the way we did, their knowledge and enthusiasm for Unreal Engine has definitely grown. In addition, for one group of students there was a good learning moment about the importance of good communication with your customer.

End products:
Both groups ultimately managed to deliver a beautiful end product that, as mentioned, we will take note of and possibly apply in our own products. The first end product is a visitor center and the second end product is a spatial plan, they are shown visually below.

End product 1: Visitor center