Color differences between Urban Digital Twin and the real city. Optimisations and compensations

With the rapid development of science and technology, urban digital twins have gradually become an essential tool for city planning and management, integrating real-time data such as traffic and energy consumption, and transforming our cities into smarter and more responsive environments. By creating virtual digital twin cities, urban management operations can be monitored and optimised in a more efficient and accurate manner, opening up new scenarios also projected towards the evolution of new development models for a better quality of life. On the basis of these premises and above all considering color as a key element in the visual perception of a city, the aim of this contribution is to verify whether in digital twins cities retain their color peculiarities and what the methodological criteria of reliability might be for a new way of managing color, considering the new technologies available. Referring to some examples of digital twins of cities published on the web and in particular referring to the Helsinki project, the essay aims to investigate whether and to what extent there are color differences between the virtual and the real vision of the city and what can be, on the basis of the results collected, possible optimisations or compensations to consider the Urban Digital Twin as a documental source also in color management both in the field of urban design and redevelopment and in the survey of the state of places.