South Korea’s Naver Creates Digital Twin of Saudi Smart City
- By CDOTrends editors
- December 06, 2022
South Korean technology companies have used the visit of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in November 2022 as an opportunity to lobby and showcase their products. They hope to get involved in the NEOM smart city project, which has an estimated budget of USD500 million.
Korean companies have already won significant NEOM contracts in the construction and energy sectors. But several technology companies are also in line to work on the project.
Saudi Arabia aims to build a new city on an empty 26,500-hectare site which will be 100% operated on renewable energy. The goal is to open the site to tourists by 2026.
One of the leading South Korean contenders for technology contracts is understood to be Naver. It provides three-dimensional mapping technologies and is pushing for a digital twinning contract for NEOM.
Naver developers met with high-ranking Saudi officials as part of a South Korean delegation earlier this year, showcasing the company’s ability to process large amounts of imaging data at a price competitive with rivals such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Naver Labs, the division responsible for mapping and object recognition technologies, claims it was able to produce a 3D map of Seoul at one-tenth the cost of a similar project in Singapore.
“It cost Singapore about USD52 million for the project using more manual tools like CAD,” said Peck Jong-yoon, a team leader at Naver Labs, “But we can reduce that cost to a tenth.”
Another differentiator is the speed at which a digital map can be simulated. The S-Map project with the Seoul city government took 17 days to complete photographing and 70 days to process 25,463 images totaling 30 terabytes.
Naver has also developed a fleet of robots to photograph roads and buildings. An M2 robot can drive autonomously, while a T-series robot can be used in the form of a backpack so a person can scan places like elevators and stairs.
The company’s new corporate headquarters, Naver 1784, was certified as Korea’s first “robot-friendly building” by the Smart City Association, with about 60 autonomous delivery robots deployed within the building.
In Japan, Naver is working with SoftBank to create 3D maps of Japanese cities.
Image credit: iStockphoto/kasezo