Hannes Walter, Vice President of Product Management with Blackshark.AI, detailed how the company developed a new way of creating large-scale, AI-powered, 3D digital twins in perfect integration with Unreal Engine in his session at Unreal Fest 2023. Addressing the challenges of generating accurate and immersive digital replicas, Walter stressed the necessity of such capabilities.
“Simulation scenarios simply need a vast scale, sometimes global scale,” he began. “Think of global data simulation, for instance, just to give you an example, or a flat-level simulation, large-scale battleground simulation.”
Blackshark.AI’s solution revolves around leveraging satellite imagery and AI-driven feature extraction to reconstruct the entire globe in stunning 3D detail. Walter explained: “We train our artificial intelligence to extract certain features from these satellite data. So we only need and have this two-dimensional satellite data. But we can still extract 3D information about the buildings, plus some metadata regarding the building roof type, even what kind of building type it might be, and so on.”
The resulting digital twins, dubbed SYNTH3D, are not mere visual representations but encompass a wealth of semantic information essential for simulation and training purposes.
“We need to have a vector-based representation that covers all relevant aspects. We want to have raster data, terrain data, vector data all integrated into this so that we can use it and leverage it for the simulation,” said Walter.
Blackshark.AI’s integration with Unreal Engine further amplifies the potential of these digital twins, enabling seamless customization and enhancement through procedural content generation and asset integration.
“The semantic 3D canvas is there, and we expose it. And based on that, you can integrate it and style it as you need,” Walter explained, showcasing examples of Quixel assets and Unreal Engine’s capabilities employed to elevate the realism and immersion of the digital environments.
The applications of Blackshark.AI’s technology span a wide range of industries, from flight simulations and gaming to battlefield simulations, urban planning, and synthetic data generation for AI training. Walter’s demonstration highlighted the versatility of their approach, revealing intricate details like automated airport generation, regional vegetation, and material attributes for physics-based sensor simulations.
With its cutting-edge fusion of AI, satellite imagery, and Unreal Engine, Blackshark.AI is poised to revolutionize the creation of large-scale 3D digital twins, empowering industries to explore and interact with meticulously reconstructed virtual environments that mirror the complexities of the real world.
