Digital Twins
What would today's digital world be without the idea of a digital twin of your worksite? These digital environments are a great way to visualize a project site when you can't be there or look back in time at an evolving project. These can be a good way to preserve historical features or the initial state of a worksite for comparison down the road.
​
The pictures here show a digital twin of an old manganese bin as well as bricked up slag waste from smelting that are stacked into walls. Notice the level of detail that can be preserved in the close up of part of the slag wall. These models are integrated into an ArcGIS mapping environment where it becomes a layer that a user turns on and off at will. There are a variety of ways to get 3D models these days and we have a number of tools to get the job done whether its an individual structure or a whole site.
Here are some other images of digital twins to get the wheels spinning. There is the Washoe stack in Anaconda, MT. This is a retired smelter stack and one of the tallest masonry structures in North America. Or maybe you need more than a single object as shown in the other two pictures of entire work sites across the valley from the stack (notice the stack in the background), or an old hauling route that meanders along the Berkeley pit and through some other historic mining property.
​
Every worksite is different and each location has different features that are meaningful to the operator, the client, and even the broader communities that are home to these sites. Its always better to be able to say "We have that!" than to wish you had taken the opportunity to capture a point in time or special structure when it was still available.