Immersive Virtual Reality for Virtual and Digital Twins: A Literature Review to Identify State of the Art and Perspectives.

Digital twins are a promising technology for various application scenarios such as industry 4.0, medical applications or even urban planning. However, the representation and interaction is often complex and not intuitive. The use of virtual reality in the representation and interaction with digital twins can remedy this. In this paper, we survey the existing literature using the PRISMA guidelines to give a first overview of existing application scenarios, advantages, difficulties and also possible prospects for future work. We identified 30 relevant papers demonstrating first prototypes of combining digital twins with virtual reality. Most applications were in the field of industry 4.0. Popular use cases are remote operations, collaborations, or training and education. While many advantages are presented, also challenges such as VR interaction design, networking optimization, and optimized hardware controls open up also interesting future research fields.