Sponsored Content by Dassault Systèmes

What happens when virtual worlds impact the real?

Scenes showing how virtual worlds affect real life splashed Europe’s largest advertising display during Dassault Systèmes’ weeklong campaign at London’s Piccadilly Circus.

A human heart beating inside the rib cage. An assembly line’s robotic arm carrying a curved pane of glass. An eVTOL circling a city of tomorrow. An astronaut exploring outside a lunar base. What do these disparate scenes have in common?

For one thing, they were all part of a recent display at London’s Piccadilly Circus showcasing Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin experiences. For another, they’re present and future examples of how virtual worlds affect real life.

The scenes, in a 3D-effect immersive video, introduce Dassault Systèmes’ solutions in ways they’re actually utilized to drive sustainable innovation across industries that impact daily life around the world.

What does Dassault Systèmes actually do?

For more than 40 years, Dassault Systèmes been developing the enabling technology for the science-based digital replicas we call virtual twins. It’s a continuous mission to harmonize product, nature and life.

Virtual twins let you visualize, model and simulate the entire environment of sophisticated experience. They facilitate sustainable business innovation across the full product lifecycle.

Empowered by virtual twins, designers don’t just design anymore; they can design for disassembly. Thanks to powerful features like lifecycle assessment, they’re able to understand the environmental and economic impact of every decision they make – from sourcing materials to packaging and distribution to recyclability.

It’s not just products. In manufacturing industries, the twins are able to feedback data from deployed products, creating a constant cycle of improvement, which helps improve not only the products but the equipment and processes used to produce the goods. Simply put: They help companies make better decisions.

Forward thinking companies have used virtual twins to inform predictive maintenance and ergonomic improvements. They’ve even used computational fluid dynamics to figure out how to safely re-open their cafeterias during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the life sciences and healthcare sector, combining virtual technologies, analytics and artificial intelligence creates the conditions to revolutionize how the human body is treated. From clinical trials to patient care, virtual twins can be applied to imagine, test and manufacture better medical devices to help practitioners prepare for and execute new surgical techniques.

During the pandemic, a host of hospitals used virtual twins to understand the computational fluid dynamics of how airborne disease spread through the facility, allowing them to design safer conditions for patients, staff and visitors. The drug discovery world is in the midst of a major transformation.

When it comes to cities, some of the most forward-thinking are using virtual twins to think like businesses. In other words, they’re using virtual twins to make data-based decisions that should improve operations while trying to improve the user experience.

We can help major European cities understand how a temporary HOV (high occupancy vehicles) lane would impact traffic, pollution dispersion and noise prior to implementing a plan.

Moving off planet: For years we’ve been helping “New Space,” companies entering the space that’s no longer the exclusive domain of national governments. Now, we’re in position to help New Space players accelerate In-space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) development, building capabilities to remove debris and repurpose spacecraft materials for new uses.

How Piccadilly’s virtual scenes affect real life

Those scenes displayed at Piccadilly Circus were dramatic. They were designed to be attention grabbing. What they weren’t is unrealistic.

The beating heart offers a glimpse of The Living Heart Project, a pioneering research initiative using realistic modeling and simulation to revolutionize cardiovascular science. The robotic arm on the assembly line is a real example of the factory virtual twins automakers and OEMs from the aerospace industry have been using for decades. The city scene reflects a range of applications for virtual twins to harmonize product, nature and life in an urban environment – from flight plans for flying cars to understanding the environmental impact of adding an HOV lane to a main thoroughfare.

And space. Thanks to virtual twins, we’re prepared for the erstwhile “final frontier” to become “Space: The Farming Frontier.” That structure in the background behind the spaceman? It’s a biopod, similar to the ones companies like Interstellar Lab are developing to grow food in space and preserve biodiversity here on Earth.

And taking a step back it’s clear that our 3D experiences touch every aspect of daily life. We offer solutions that empower businesses and individuals to create sustainable products and services to accelerate sustainable innovation and help humanity thrive.

This article was created by TechCrunch Brand Studio. Learn more about partnering with TechCrunch Brand Studio to promote your content.


This article is presented by TC Brand Studio. This is paid content, TechCrunch editorial was not involved in the development of this article. Reach out to learn more about partnering with TC Brand Studio.

More TechCrunch

The Appellate Court of Montenegro ruled on Thursday that Terraform Labs co-founder, Do Kwon, should be returned to his home country, South Korea. The ruling confirmed an earlier decision in…

Terraform Labs co-founder and crypto fugitive, Do Kwon, set for extradition to South Korea

A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has…

Meta’s Threads crosses 200 million active users

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will be in San Francisco on October 28–30, and we’re already excited! Disrupt brings innovation for every stage of your startup journey, and we could not bring you this…

Connect with Google Cloud, Aerospace, Qualcomm and more at Disrupt 2024

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according…

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

Intel announced it would layoff more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 employees, in a memo to employees on Thursday. The massive headcount is part of a large plan…

Intel to lay off 15,000 employees

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in…

AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is ‘fair use’

In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin.

iPad sales help bail out Apple amid a continued iPhone slide

Molly Alter wears a lot of hats. She’s a mocumentary filmmaker working on a project about an alternate reality where charades is big business. She’s a caesar salad connoisseur and…

How filming a cappella concerts and dance recitals led Northzone’s newest partner Molly Alter to a career in VC

Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal,…

Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search

The San Jose-based startup raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in its most recent round, according to multiple sources.

Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut

Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation is looking to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races toward a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024.  Aurora is…

Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation to sell up to $420M in shares ahead of commercial launch

X (formerly Twitter) can no longer be accessed in the Mac App Store, suggesting that it has been officially delisted.  Searches for both “Twitter” and “X” on Apple’s platform no…

Twitter disappears from Mac App Store

Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history.…

Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

When Xiaoyin Qu was growing up in China, she was obsessed with learning how to build paper airplanes that could do flips in the air. Her parents, though, didn’t have…

Heeyo built an AI chatbot to be a billion kids’ interactive tutor and friend

While the company was awarded a massive, $4.2 billion contract to accelerate Starliner development in 2014, it was structured as a “fixed-price” model.

Boeing bleeds another $125M on Starliner program, bringing total losses to $1.6B

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Summer road…

Anthony Levandowski bets on off-road autonomy, Nuro plots a comeback and Applied Intuition gets more investor love

Google’s new features include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis.

Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities

Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that has raised more than $300 million from investors, went through another round of layoffs in July, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This is…

VC darling Rad Power Bikes hit with another round of layoffs

Five years ago, as robotaxis and self-driving truck startups were still raking in millions in venture capital, Anthony Levandowski turned to off-road autonomy. Now, that decision — which brought the…

Why Anthony Levandowski returned to his off-road autonomous vehicle roots with AV startup Pronto

Commercial space station company Vast is building a private microgravity research lab as part of its wider Haven-1 station plans. The module is set to launch no earlier than the…

Vast plans microgravity lab on its Haven-1 private space station

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of…

Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

Open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.  StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss,…

Open source startup FOSSA is buying StackShare, a site used by 1.5M developers

Ola Electric and FirstCry are set to test investor appetite with public listing, both pricing their shares below their previous valuation asks.

Indian startups gut valuations ahead of IPO push

The European Union’s risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting from today.

The EU’s AI Act is now in force

The company also said it has received regulatory clearance to start Phase 2 clinical trials for a new drug in the U.S. later this year.

Healx, an AI-enabled drug discovery platform for rare diseases, raises $47M

The European Commission (EC) has given the go-ahead to HPE’s planned megabucks acquisition of Juniper Networks.

EU greenlights HPE’s $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg…

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

Axle Energy is a B2B, back-end infrastructure business focused on connecting flexible assets, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, to energy markets that aren’t otherwise available for consumers to…

Axle Energy’s sprint to decarbonize the grid lights up with $9M seed led by Accel

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on…

OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage,…

Meta says India is the largest market for Meta AI usage