Digital Twins and the Future of Immersive Experiences

Digital twins can tackle an array of thorny challenges that federal agencies face today. By creating exact virtual replicas of objects, systems, and processes, linking the simulated version to the real thing through live data feeds, digital twin solutions can uncover new insights and improve outcomes for these types of mission-critical problems and more:

• How do you test a satellite’s response to system disruptions or errors when it’s more than a thousand miles up?
• How do you integrate testing and analysis into the early stages of mission-critical systems —especially when you need to test for rare, high-impact scenarios?
• How do you collate data streams from operations, development, workforce, environment, weather, and security to make a military base more resilient against natural disasters?

Chief Technologist Trishna Lovley works with digital twins in the heart of Booz Allen’s applied research, prototyping, and experimentation initiatives on the BrightLabs team, within our Chief Technology Office.

Read on to learn more about what digital twins are, how Trishna got involved in this powerful and innovative technology area, and how Booz Allen’s collective ingenuity is rising to the dual challenges of supporting an exceptional workforce and industry-leading solutions. 

Trishna describes digital twins as nascent technology grounded in 3D, immersive capabilities like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). They can recreate and represent everything from tiny pieces of technology to massive installations like Tyndall Air Force Base (AFB) in Florida.

Tyndall, in fact, is a standout example. After the base was badly damaged by a Category 5 Hurricane in 2018, Booz Allen’s digital twin team worked with external partners to build a complex, highly interactive simulation of what the base could become during rebuild—a “Facility of the Future” leveraging climate-resilient infrastructure and a host of emerging technologies. Through the digital twin, the Air Force team was able to quickly iterate and test new design decisions during construction, working in a risk-free environment that provided rich, detailed feedback and reflected real-world changes.

Combining immersive interaction with emerging technologies like IoT and AI, a digital twin can become an underlying platform that allows a federal agency or other client to consolidate multiple divergent mission priorities, Trishna explains.

That’s incredibly powerful, she says, because it creates a single source of truth for analytics and complex decision making, enabling collaboration across different work streams for real-time impacts.

Trishna began her career in digital media and online marketing. She joined Booz Allen almost 8 years ago as a senior consultant, helping clients modernize and transform their digital and IT operations.

Early on, her efforts to bring people and technology into alignment involved Agile workflows, DevOps projects, current state assessments, and user experience transformations. She managed cross-functional teams of software engineers, designers, change managers, and communications professionals in the implementation of technology strategies and solutions.

Then she got involved with digital twins, and the scope, aperture and purview of her work expanded substantially.

“It's more than just your scrum meetings or looking at a JIRA board for each sprint,” she explains. “It's staying on top of the technology landscape and educating myself on not only the new technologies out there, but who could we potentially partner and co-develop with? One thing we talk about and look at a lot is dual-use technology. How can you repurpose that for the government?”

One example is Booz Allen’s work with the Unity game developer platform. “When you think video games, you don’t think government,” Trishna acknowledges. “But we use it in our digital twin work to build simulations in an interactive, 3D manner in areas like climate and human performance and for replicas of physical structures, like the facilities at Tyndall AFB.”

“Our partnership with Unity allows us to take static spreadsheets from multiple systems and start pulling them together into a single source of truth,” Trishna continues. “That gives government clients the ability to really start understanding and contextualizing the information that they need to make certain decisions.”

Just as in Trishna’s early days at Booz Allen, her current work with BrightLabs and digital twins involves cross-disciplinary teams: generative AI engineers, data engineers, and experts in solutions like Unity. It all comes together into “this extensible digital twin platform that our clients can plug-and-play based on technology requirements, privacy requirements, security requirements, and the mission,” she says.

“What we're doing with our digital twin business is taking the best of what Booz Allen is known for, which is its people and the closeness that we have with the clients on their mission—and combining it with the ability to integrate systems from the frontrunners in industry,” Trishna says.

Collective ingenuity has also enabled Trishna to achieve the career she has today. “Booz Allen has seen many of my life milestones, from getting married to having two kids. And I wouldn't have stayed here as long if I didn't have the support to be able to do that,” she says.

“There's a hidden workload of making all your kids’ doctors' appointments and going to all the PTA meetings. Add in accelerating your career, many women just burn out,” she says.

Her colleagues at Booz Allen made sure she had the bandwidth she needed. “I am lucky to be surrounded by people within this organization who, when I said, ‘I need to step back to focus on family,’ replied with, ‘We can pick up that slack and we’ll be waiting for you to come back,’” says Trishna.

“It has been extremely rewarding to work in the digital twin space because of the sheer impact of what the technology can do,” Trishna says. “I want to leave the world in a better place for my children, and I feel like I'm actually doing that by thinking through new ways of bringing digital twin technologies to the government, so that they can address really massive problems, from national security threats to climate change.”