IoT Device and Virtual Representation Application Design and Implementation for Physical World and Virtual World Real-time Synchronization

Abstract

This paper presents informative and practical techniques to design real-time synchronization between an IoT device and a virtual reality application. The IoT device is an embedded system that consists of sensors and actuators. It can sense environmental parameters with sensors, and it can interact with surrounding objects using actuators. Therefore, IoT devices can be seen as physical objects or parameters in the physical world. The proposed IoT device utilizes real-time communication to perform real-time data exchanging with virtual reality or virtual world applications. The virtual world application is a realistic virtual representation (virtual world) of objects in the physical world. The virtual world is a replica version of the physical world that runs on a computer or a mobile device. It means that all objects in the virtual world are replicated versions of the physical world. Each object in the two worlds is paired (linked). Changing object parameters in one world will make the same change in another world at the same time. This research focuses on the core of Cyber-Physical Systems and Digital Twins. It is the real-time synchronization of the physical world and virtual world. There are three main parts proposed in this paper. Firstly, the design and implementation of the IoT device. Secondly, the virtual world implementation, and 3D modeling techniques. Lastly, the informative guidelines and techniques for implementing multiple protocols supported by real-time servers. The proposed system is evaluated in several real-world used conditions to analyze the real-time data exchange and synchronization between the physical world and the virtual world. The experimental results show that the real-time synchronization of the physical world and the virtual world can be successfully performed as expected.