Digital twin of largest vessel in the offshore wind industry

The essence

DEME was looking for a partner to create a digital twin of their most innovative and largest vessel, the Orion. As this digital twin is extremely large, finding the right solution wasn’t easy. That’s when they contacted us. We created a smartglasses solution that uses remote rendering in the cloud for visualizing the ship at its highest quality. In the future, the digital twin will be used to easily gain maintenance information.

The challenge

Visualizing millions of polygons

DEME was looking for a way to create a digital twin of their largest ship, the Orion. It’s the most innovative vessel in the offshore wind industry, set to install 28 giant monopiles.

In the first instance, they wanted a tool to visualize the ship in 3D at conferences and fairs to support the information given about it. As they visit exhibitions from all over the world, it’s important that the tool is portable, easy to set up, and to be used repeatedly.

They didn’t find an out of the box solution for this as the digital twin of the ship is extremely large, containing millions of polygons. That's when they contacted us.

The Solution

We created a digital twin of the ship and a custom application for the HoloLens that visualizes the ship at real scale. This creates the experience as if you’re really on the ship. On top, you can observe the ship from different angles and even teleport yourself to different locations on the ship. The 3D model of the ship is rendered remotely in the Azure cloud to achieve the highest quality.

The result

Showcased at events all over the world

The application has already been used on many events such as Nerdland Festival. It even has been used next to the actual Orion. On top of that, it was granted a fixed spot at the Mercator Museum in Sint-Niklaas (Belgium).

The future

Address real-time information

As the Orion is the largest vessel in the offshore wind industry, multiple maintenance tasks are performed daily. In the next phase, DEME wants to leverage the digital twin to address real-time information about these maintenance jobs. Visually mapping these jobs allows them to get a clear overview of potential risk zones.