Digital Twins, AI Design Showcase-Higher Education explored emerging digital technologies and their impact on the AEC industry. The event was organized by the Cincinnati BIM User Group and held on April 16, at College of Design Arcgutectyre, Art, and Planning (DAAP), University of Cincinnati.
Hosted by Prof. Ming Tang at the DAAP, the showcase featured student work from the University of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky University, and Cincinnati State. Attendees experienced digital twin, AI, and BIM technologies firsthand, highlighting how these student teams are helping shape the future of the AEC workforce.
Special thanks to IMAGINiT Technologies for sponsoring this event.
https://i1.wp.com/ming3d.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/event-flyer-1.jpg?fit=959%2C11971197959Ming Tanghttp://ming3d.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/TY_logo-300x300-new.pngMing Tang2026-03-31 19:20:502026-04-19 15:16:13DT & AI for AEC showcase
Technology forHealth, Resilience, Equity , and Decision-Making
Team: A&S: Kelly Merrill, Lauren Forbes, Briana Simms, Paris Wheeler, Diego Cuadros, DAAP: Ming Tang
Funding: Center for Clinical & Translational Science & Training. CCTST. Pilot Grant. $50,000. PI. Merrill, Forbes, Co-I. Tang, Cuadros, Simms, Wheeler. 2026. University of Cincinnati.
Project Aims:
Aim 1: Co-design a set of digital data governance policies that reflect Black community preferences, concerns, and expectations around the use of their digital health data.
Aim 2: Assess the utility of digital twin technology (3D city modeling with VR) for community advocacy and population health-related objectives.
Aim 3: Co-design and develop a community-driven, population health intervention and participatory planning tool.
Ming Tang’s involvement in the human-centered digital twin can be traced back to his work at the MSU MIND Lab roughly two decades ago, and the THRED project builds directly on that foundation. There is also a clear conceptual link to HomeNetToo project then, where multiple interfaces—a standard web interface, a spatial interface, and an interpersonal interface—were developed to examine how different modes of interaction influence knowledge acquisition across varying cognitive styles. That early work established an important premise: the design of an interface fundamentally shapes how users interpret, understand, and engage with information.
THRED extends this line of inquiry beyond controlled experimental settings into a real-world, system-scale platform by integrating digital twins, and data-driven decision environments. Rather than comparing interfaces in isolation, it synthesizes them—bringing together spatial (3D environments), informational (data visualization and dashboards), and social (community and stakeholder engagement) interfaces into a unified ecosystem. In this sense, THRED represents a shift from experimental interaction design toward an applied, human-centered digital twin framework. It maintains continuity with earlier immersive technology research while significantly expanding its scope, enabling new forms of collective understanding, decision-making, and behavioral insight at urban and societal scales.
Adondale Digtal Twin (ADT) Prototypes
1. DATA VIZ ADT
mobile phone must be put in horizonal orientation in order to see buttons
We are excited to announce the launch of Phase 3 of the VR-Based Employee Safety Training: Therapeutic Crisis Intervention Simulation project, building on the success of the previous two phases. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together the Immersive Learning Lab and the Employee Safety Learning Lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), in partnership with the Extended Reality Lab (XR-Lab) at the University of Cincinnati.
This phase will focus on developing an advanced virtual hospital environment populated with digital patients to simulate a variety of real-world Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) scenarios. The digital twins encompass both the hospital setting and patient avatars. The project aims to design immersive training modules, capture user performance data, and conduct a rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of VR-based training in enhancing employee safety and crisis response capabilities
Principal Investigator: Ming Tang. Funding Amount: $38,422. Project Period: April 1, 2025 – December 1, 2026
CCHMC Collaborators: Dr. Nancy Daraiseh, Dr. Maurizio Macaluso, Dr. Aaron Vaughn.
Research Domains: Virtual Reality, Safety Training, Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, Mental Health, Digital Twins, Digital Humans, Human Behavior Simulation.
We look forward to continuing this impactful work and advancing the role of immersive technologies in healthcare education and safety training
Concept of Digital Twin: Digital Patient + Digital Hospital.
This paper explores the evolving relationship between Digital Twins (DT) and the Metaverse, two foundational yet often conflated digital paradigms in digital architecture. While DTs function as mirrored models of real-world systems—integrating IoT, BIM, and real-time analytics to support decision-making—Metaverses are typically fictional, immersive, multi-user environments shaped by social, cultural, and speculative narratives. Through several research projects, the team investigate the divergence between DTs and Metaverses through the lens of their purpose, data structure, immersion, and interactivity, while highlighting areas of convergence driven by emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Extended Reality (XR).This study aims to investigate the convergence of DTs and the Metaverse in digital architecture, examining how emerging technologies—such as AI, XR, and Large Language Models (LLMs)—are blurring their traditional boundaries. By analyzing their divergent purposes, data structures, and interactivity modes, as well as hybrid applications (e.g., data-integrated virtual environments and AI-driven collaboration), this study seeks to define the opportunities and challenges of this integration for architectural design, decision-making, and immersive user experiences. Our research spans multiple projects utilizing XR and AI to develop DT and the Metaverse. The team assess the capabilities of AI in DT environments, such as reality capture and smart building management. Concurrently, the team evaluates metaverse platforms for online collaboration and architectural education, focusing on features facilitating multi-user engagement. The paper presents evaluations of various virtual environment development pipelines, comparing traditional BIM+IoT workflows with novel approaches such as Gaussian Splatting and generative AI for content creation. The team further explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in both domains, such as virtual agents or LLM-powered Non-Player-Controlled Characters (NPC), enabling autonomous interaction and enhancing user engagement within spatial environments. Finally, the paper argues that DTs and Metaverse’s once-distinct boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. Hybrid digital spaces—such as virtual buildings with data-integrated twins and immersive, social metaverses—demonstrate this convergence. As digital environments mature, architects are uniquely positioned to shape these dual-purpose ecosystems, leveraging AI, XR, and spatial computing to fuse data-driven models with immersive and user-centered experiences.
Keywords: metaverse; digital twin; extended reality; AI
https://i2.wp.com/ming3d.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/image.png?fit=1366%2C100910091366Ming Tanghttp://ming3d.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/TY_logo-300x300-new.pngMing Tang2025-03-18 17:48:022026-06-01 19:38:44SMAT: Scalable Multi-Agent AI for DT