Digital Twin in Augmented Reality: Predicting the Future of Personas by 2030

Team_Eden | 2024-11-09

You've probably heard of the concept of a persona: a fictional representation of an ideal customer, often used by companies to better understand their target audiences. But are you familiar with digital twins?

As we'll explore further, this innovation, applied to the customer marketing, is the logical evolution of digital personas. It provides a more precise and dynamic model, integrating numerous criteria to define profiles and interact with them in real-time.

With advancements in technology and AI integration, the upcoming years promise to be fascinating. Decision-making will never be the same again.

This is the future we’re aiming for at EdenPersona. Let's take you on a journey into the future of customer marketing.

A New Era: The Rise of AI

Thanks to advancements in AI and other cutting-edge technologies, personas have become more dynamic and accurate. The new capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) make them easier to generate while adding interactive elements.

For example, EdenPersona offers a solution to create personas with just a few clicks. You can leverage diverse data sets and then interact dynamically with these profiles. Through an integrated chatbot, you can engage in direct conversations with your personas. This enables you to simulate marketing or product development scenarios, allowing deeper insights into customer needs and motivations.

This approach makes the analysis process far more engaging and precise, offering unique flexibility when interacting with generated profiles. It’s already a small revolution, but trust me… it’s just the beginning!

From Personas to Digital Twins

Digital twins are virtual representations of real-world systems or entities. When applied to personas, they allow near real-time visualization and simulation of customer behaviors, offering a more precise understanding and the potential for real-time interaction.

Unlike traditional, relatively static personas, digital twins update in real-time based on user behavior changes. This automatic update ensures that your personas remain closely aligned with market realities and audience shifts at any given moment. Such dynamic evolution empowers companies to continuously adjust their strategies and identify emerging needs.

Real-World Examples of Digital Twin Usage

Siemens

Since 2017, Siemens has integrated digital twins to enhance its industrial processes and has adapted this technology to model customer behaviors. Digital twins help simulate customer interactions with their industrial systems, providing better insights into user needs and challenges.

Unilever

Unilever implemented digital twins in 2019 to model consumer behaviors. They can optimize their products based on simulated data obtained from internal tests and external partnerships, allowing them to create more detailed and interactive personas.

BMW

BMW has been using digital twin technology since 2020 to model consumer preferences in vehicle design and features. This enables them to simulate purchase scenarios and better understand potential customer expectations, as well as ensure maintenance optimization.

Limitations and Costs of Digital Twins

Implementing digital twins for personas is not without challenges, particularly due to the high costs involved. Maintaining a digital twin requires significant investments, sometimes reaching millions of dollars, due to the necessary infrastructure and expertise.

However, as AI continues to evolve, the associated costs will likely decrease over time. With increasing automation, open-source technologies, and enhanced AI algorithms, it will become possible to simplify and reduce the costs of developing and maintaining digital twins. This will eventually lead to broader adoption. In the near future, even small businesses might regularly use digital twins to create new products and improve communication throughout their product lifecycle.

Augmented Reality Personas

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies enable immersive experiences that can be used to better understand how personas interact with products or services in a simulated environment. Imagine projecting a 3D simulation of purchase behavior driven by AI, analyzing response times, pages viewed, areas explored, and clicked links. And, of course, you could go even further than what EdenPersona offers today: chatting with your customer avatar! It would be right there beside you, rendered in lifelike 3D.

After all, AI can already generate images, videos, 3D objects, and even animate video game characters. It can even stand in for you during a video call (source).

AR Glasses: The Future of Interaction

This is not science fiction; the future is knocking on our door! Facebook (Meta) embarked on an ambitious AR glasses project back in 2017. Their goal is to replace smartphones by offering an immersive, intuitive interaction with digital information overlaid directly in the user's field of vision.

In September 2024, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Orion glasses, set for a commercial release in 2027. These glasses will feature low-latency AR technology, enabling video calls, GPS navigation, and notifications visible directly through the lenses. They make the user experience as seamless as using a smartphone, with voice and gesture controls to simplify interaction.

Reducing Data Needs with AGI

General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) could revolutionize the creation of personas by reducing the reliance on vast datasets.

What is AGI and When Can We Expect It?

AGI refers to AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a broad range of tasks, similar to a human being. Unlike today’s AI, which is specialized in specific tasks, AGI will be able to handle any type of problem or context. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, AGI could be achieved in a few thousand days, potentially between 2027 and 2030 (source).

Why AGI Could Better Understand Human Behavior and Emotions

AGI, with its unsupervised learning capabilities and computational power, could analyze millions of human behaviors recorded in video, audio, and text, extracting complex models of emotions and reactions. Unlike current AI, which is often limited by predefined algorithms, AGI would be capable of understanding nuances like micro-expressions, voice tone variations, and overlapping emotions.

The Future of Personas by 2030

Rest assured, your beloved personas will evolve significantly in the coming years. They will likely become more interactive, dynamic, and closer to human reality. With advances in AI and AR, businesses will be able to engage personas in immersive environments for an even deeper understanding of user behavior and expectations. And yes, we at EdenPersona are excited to be part of this journey!