Duality AI releases FalconEditor digital twin simulation platform based on Unreal

Duality AI announced today the release of FalconEditor, an intuitive visual tool for creating digital twins and simulations.

The Duality FalconEditor is powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a leading real-time 3D engine used to make popular games like Fortnite. In this case, Duality is using it to help create digital twins, which simulate real-world locations such as factories or office buildings.

Digital twins are increasingly popular as a way simulate the real world and save money. With a digital twin, a company could design a factory in the digital realm and work out the bugs. Then, once the design is good, it can build the factory in real life. And the factory can be outfitted with sensors that feed the data back to the digital twin, which can be further improved to reflect the real building.

San Mateo, California-based Duality AI created FalconEditor to accelerate the adoption of digital twin simulation tech. Duality AI has 36 employees.

The combination of Falcon’s comprehensive twins-to-data simulation workflow, combined with its extension of Unreal Editor and open-source digital twin definition format, now unlocks the entirety of the Unreal Engine ecosystem to enterprise customers without forcing them to use specific hardware or proprietary AI models, Duality AI said.

Digital twin simulation is emerging as a powerful resource for solving complex problems in AI, robotics, and smart system development. It can bring understanding of the physical world to AI models; ensure safe operation of robots; and bring data driven predictability to planning and preparing for high-stakes AI and automation deployments.

But industrial simulation tools don’t lend themselves to the unique requirements of AI synthetic data creation and autonomy requirements. Conversely, game engines and visual effects simulation tools have historically required specialized skill sets that can present a significant hurdle to frictionless utilization in an enterprise context.

FalconEditor is an integrated development environment (IDE) that, by design, functions to bridge this gap, and streamline the generation of high fidelity, photoreal data from digital twin simulation. This release marks a major step in making digital twin simulation readily accessible to engineers and data scientists, thus significantly lowering the barriers to its adoption by AI and automation teams, Duality said.

Development and release of FalconEditor is made possible by an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Epic Games, creator of Unreal Engine.

“From the outset, Duality based Falcon on Unreal Engine due to its unmatched rendering capabilities and immense content availability,” says Duality CEO Apurva Shah, in a statement. “Bringing the functionality of Unreal Editor to Falcon was the clear next step to make simulation design that much easier and to better serve our customers’ needs. We’re extremely proud of FalconEditor, and grateful to the team at Epic Games for supporting our vision of a digital twin future.”

This agreement positions Duality as an optimal simulation solutions provider for the Unreal Engine ecosystem. The FalconPro product license covers Unreal Editor access as well as first-party support from Duality’s customer success team. By collaborating with Duality, Epic Games shows their continued commitment to the adoption of Unreal Engine for enterprise applications.

“Duality is opening up new ways to create high-quality digital twins by extending FalconEditor with Unreal Editor functionality,” said Bill Clifford, VP of Unreal Engine and Creator Marketplaces at Epic Games, in a statement. “Engineers and data scientists will be able to use these enhanced features to create massive virtual worlds using AI and robotic systems for digital twin simulation from anywhere, including directly from a web browser.”

To make this possible, Duality added digital twin functionality to Unreal Editor and seamlessly integrated it with FalconSim, their high-performance digital twin simulator. And vitally for frictionless enterprise adoption, FalconEditor is similarly integrated with FalconCloud, Duality’s digital twin and scenario catalog and cloud simulation environment.

The end result enables Falcon users to take any of the millions of assets from the Unreal Engine ecosystem — items, systems, environments — customize and easily convert them to simulation-ready digital twins, complete with tunable parameters and additional required data.

FalconEditor’s fully visual interface makes it intuitive to arrange and manipulate these digital twins, enabling intuitive configuration of diverse simulation scenarios which, with Falcon’s library of virtual sensors, are instantaneously available for data generation.

Creators can test and troubleshoot their scenarios — including editing Python code for augmenting digital twin behaviors — directly in FalconEditor’s IDE before sharing them with collaborators via FalconCloud. Scenarios can then be executed with complete flexibility by FalconSim in the cloud, within enterprise pipelines, or on a local computer.

“Being able to simulate high-fidelity scenarios allows us to validate and demo real-world workflows in our products in a wide variety of unique situations, ultimately allowing us to speed up the testing and development cycle,” said Dan Zangri, product manager at Palantir Technologies, in a statement. “Falcon allows us to produce synthetic sensor data in place of having to run costly experiments in the field, making it easier to cover edge cases and ship products faster.”