Fresh from the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, where global advances in AI-enabled smart city solutions were showcased, Finnish and international partners gathered at the Immersive Sustainability Lab in Helsinki XR Center on 17 November for the City Digital Twins Summit 2025.
The Summit was a culmination of HXRC’s broader interest in bringing emergent technologies in a sustainable manner to Finnish cities and companies and brought together a wide cross-section of the ecosystem: the Cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, Vantaa, and Oulu; leading technology, infrastructure and research organisations including Younite, Sitowise, Sova3D, Helen, Elisa, Dassault Systèmes, WSP Finland, Twinverse, Benete, Cintoo, Forum Virium Helsinki and FlyAR; and international initiatives and collaborators such as RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden), Japan’s PLATEAU program, and the Cluster metaverse platform. Partners from Metropolia UAS’ Smart and Creative City Innovation Hub, Metadata to Metaverse Project and AI Start Project were also present, underscoring Finland’s collaborative strength in digital twin development.
Around the world, city digital twins are rapidly evolving from static 3D visualisations into dynamic, multi-layered platforms that integrate GIS, BIM, IoT, mobility data, Earth observation, simulation, XR, and increasingly AI. They support planning, climate resilience, infrastructure management, public engagement, and operational coordination. At the same time, international developments, from Japan’s PLATEAU and Singapore’s Virtual Singapore to Europe’s Destination Earth, highlight how digital twins are becoming essential tools for data governance, cross-sector collaboration, and transparent decision-making. The global urban digital twin market surpassed USD 8 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow more than tenfold in the coming decade.
Yet while the technological momentum is strong, the field remains fragmented: data is siloed, standards are evolving, and pilot projects often struggle to transition into long-term operational services. The Summit acknowledged these challenges directly. It aimed to define real municipal needs, showcase practical cases from Finland and abroad, and strengthen a shared ecosystem through coordinated development, shared learning, and grounded, human-centred approaches.
Insights from Cities and Partners
- PLATEAU (Japan) presented the world’s largest open 3D city model ecosystem, enabling semantic urban data, realistic simulations, and national-scale infrastructure for digital twin development.
- City of Helsinki demonstrated use cases spanning zoning visualisation, neighbourhood engagement, construction-phase communication, BIM-linked permitting, and emerging drone operations.
- City of Tampere showcased participatory digital twin tools for walkability, safety, climate, and long-term construction communication, and presented their award-winning Station Area Digital Twin for early citizen engagement, as well as WeGenerate project actions and upcoming AI pilots for planetary wellbeing in the IURC Asia & Australasia programme.
- City of Vantaa showcased MATTI, one of Finland’s most integrated operational models, linking data, processes, and interdepartmental workflows to support land-use and infrastructure decisions.
- City of Oulu presented its work within FINverse and the expanding Ouluverse ecosystem, featuring XR teaching tools, digital health applications, harbour logistics, autonomous system pilots, and a EUR 12M portfolio of metaverse-related projects.
- RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden) shared Nordic research perspectives on shared and interoperable digital twin environments, demonstrating distributed data models, intuitive collaboration concepts, and emerging 5D prototypes that connect objects, time, and scenarios across departments.
- Younite highlighted the convergence of high-fidelity 3D environments, AI, and digital twins for real-world applications: mobility and accessibility tools for Gothenburg, virtual conference and city-promotion environments, synthetic data generation for AI training, and their NVIDIA-based smart city framework.
- Sitowise presented their work on integrating geospatial information, environmental data and urban modelling into practical digital twin solutions for cities. Their talk highlighted the need for common standards like CityGML to ensure interoperability, and showcased examples such as the Tampere Asemakeskus digital twin, which supports planning through rich 3D environments
- Forum Virium Helsinki offered a grounded perspective from a city-owned innovation organisation. They emphasised modular, interoperable ecosystems rather than monolithic systems, showcased work integrating environmental, social, and mobility data, and highlighted projects on walkability, climate vulnerability, multi-species perspectives, and satellite-based Earth observation. Their perspective stresses that digital twins must support planning discussions that include the natural world, vulnerable groups, and non-human species—not just physical infrastructure.
- Cluster (Japan), who is currently conducting a PoC project with the City of Espoo through AI Start Project, demonstrated collaborative metaverse twin environments with AI systems optimising data, scenes, and multiuser interaction in real time.
- FlyAR showed how XR can make long-term construction and complex planning scenarios instantly understandable to the public.
The presentations highlighted an ecosystem that is both technologically ambitious and deeply rooted in real operational needs, ready for the next stage of coordinated action.
A Shared Narrative: Building Digital Twins That Serve People
Throughout the afternoon discussions, participants returned to a central theme: the value of a digital twin lies in how well it serves human needs. Technology alone cannot solve the challenges cities face; instead, digital twins must be built from an understanding of how people experience the city, its social rhythms, emotional landscapes, barriers, and opportunities.
“We don’t actually know what parts of the urban environment people really perceive as important for their social functions… it’s not something that you directly map with a sensor. Loneliness radar. It’s not indicated.”
Participants reflected on urban issues such as loneliness, safety, beauty, and access to nature, topics often invisible in traditional datasets but fundamental to daily life. They discussed how multidisciplinary digital twins could help illuminate underused spaces, uncover mobility or accessibility barriers, and reveal environmental discomforts or social patterns that shape urban behaviour.
Communication emerged as a priority. Finnish cities are undergoing long-term transformations, and residents need intuitive ways to understand disruptions, visualise the future, and participate meaningfully in planning. XR and AR were recognised as key tools for helping people grasp complexities that are difficult to convey through conventional maps or PDFs.
“Traditional methods… can be a bit boring for people to engage with or really understand. The digital twin allows us to make it interesting, more visual, more interactive.”
Governance and organisational pace also surfaced as critical challenges. Many successful pilot projects struggle to advance within decision-making structures not yet designed for digital twin–driven processes. Participants noted the importance of stable frameworks, shared standards, and long-term operational models. And throughout the discussions, AI stood out as a major driver of the next generation of digital twins, enabling semantic enrichment, simulation, personalised guidance, and natural-language interaction.
“Everything that moves will be automated… and we will need digital twins and AI to make this happen.”
“Sensors that use AI to detect anomalies so that we can have early threat detection… AI simulations will support planning.”
Despite the complexities, the tone was optimistic. Participants agreed that Finland’s values, openness, collaboration, trust, and long-term thinking, create ideal conditions for building digital twins that are ethically grounded, operationally meaningful, and socially relevant.
City Digital Twin Sandbox at Match XR 2025
The momentum carried into the next day at Match XR 2025, where the City Digital Twin Sandbox showcased demos, visualisations, and prototypes from across the ecosystem. The Sandbox drew strong interest from local and international visitors, reaffirming the demand for accessible, human-centred digital twin applications. The feedback was energising and has inspired us to take this work to the next level in 2026.
Nordic Values & Metadata to Metaverse
The Summit reaffirmed how deeply Nordic values: transparency, inclusivity, trust, sustainability, and openness, shape digital twin development in Finland. These values also guide Metadata to Metaverse, Metropolia’s multi-year Project funded by Business Finland to build interoperable, multi-level digital twin infrastructure from building to district to city. By connecting data with meaningful municipal use cases and fostering ethical, accessible technologies, the project aims to strengthen Finland’s digital twin ecosystem and support its long-term development.
Get in Touch and Stay Updated!
For any questions about the City Digital Twins Sandbox at the HXRC contact Janset Shawash janset.shawash@metropolia.fi
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