International Journal of Digital Earth

Immersive Geographical Digital Twins: Interaction, Visualisation, and Applications

Digital twins are increasingly employed as digital representations of physical entities, systems, and processes, supporting monitoring, simulation, prediction, and data-informed decision-making across a broad range of domains, from manufacturing and healthcare to energy systems, transportation, and the built environment. Within this field, geographical digital twins focus specifically on geospatially referenced environments, integrating geospatial data, sensor observations, simulation models, and three-dimensional representations of cities, regions, landscapes, and infrastructure systems. Such systems are applied in areas such as urban planning, mobility, environmental monitoring, disaster management, and infrastructure operation. Their growing spatial, temporal, and thematic complexity, however, introduces challenges for data exploration, interpretation, and analysis. Immersive technologies, including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, offer alternative interfaces for engaging with these environments by supporting spatially situated, embodied, and interactive forms of analysis. In this context, immersive representations may facilitate the examination of spatial relationships, multiscale phenomena, complex data layers, and simulated future scenarios.

Investigating interaction and visualisation is essential for understanding how immersive geographical digital twins can be used effectively. Interaction techniques determine how users access, navigate, manipulate, and explore complex spatial information, while visualisation techniques shape how the digital twin and the data related to it  are represented, perceived, and interpreted. At the same time, immersive geographical digital twins are relevant to a wide range of application areas, including planning, environmental monitoring, mobility, infrastructure management, education, cultural heritage, public engagement, simulation, and serious games. These domains differ substantially in their users, tasks, data, and objectives, creating diverse requirements for immersive systems. Studying both the underlying interaction and visualisation approaches and their application across different contexts is therefore important for developing a broader understanding of the capabilities, limitations, and design requirements of immersive geographical digital twins, as well as for identifying approaches that can be transferred across domains.

This Article Collection brings together research on immersive geographical digital twins, spanning foundational techniques, system design, and domain-specific use. Topics of interest include interaction and navigation in immersive geographic environments, visual representation of spatial and multidimensional data, collaborative and multi-user systems, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, integration of real-time and simulated information, and evaluation methods for immersive geographic systems. Contributions may also examine applications in urban and regional planning, environmental monitoring, mobility, infrastructure, education, cultural heritage, public participation, simulation, and serious and educational games. The Collection welcomes empirical studies, methodological contributions, technical system papers, case studies, and review articles that help clarify current capabilities, emerging challenges, and future directions for immersive geographical digital twins in Digital Earth research.

Article Collection Guest Advisors

Johanna Pirker is an Austrian computer science professor specializing in games, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. She is Professor of N-Dimensional User Experience at the Technical University of Munich and leads the Game Lab at TU Graz, with previous academic and research positions at MIT, LMU Munich, and ETH Zurich. Her research explores how games and immersive technologies can support learning, science, therapy, and other real-world applications.

Arnaud Prouzeau is a researcher at Inria Saclay and Paris-Saclay University, in France. His main research interest is the use of immersive technologies to visualise and analyse data, and the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. He received his Ph.D. from Paris-Saclay University in 2017 about collaborative use of wall-displays in control rooms, and then did a postdoc at Monash University, in Melbourne, about immersive analytics.

Georg Arbesser-Rastburg is a researcher at TU Graz with an interdisciplinary background in civil engineering and computer science. His research focuses on virtual reality, games, and the use of immersive technologies to support the understanding and exploration of complex spatial and technical information. He is particularly interested in designing and evaluating interaction concepts for data-rich environments, with applications in cities, infrastructure, and the built environment.

Further Information

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisors for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts.

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 31 July 2027

Please contact Alex Johnson at alex.johnson@tandf.co.uk if you require further information about, or to request a discount code for this Article Collection 

Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Article Collection Key Terms

1. Immersive digital twin
2. Geovisualization
3. Immersive analytics
4. Geospatial data
5. Extended reality