Nestled in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, Oregon State University (OSU) is the state’s largest public research institution. Since its founding in 1868, OSU has grown into a thriving academic community with more than 36,000 students and over 272,000 alumni worldwide. With a legacy built on innovation and discovery, the university is renowned for its excellence in engineering, forestry, agriculture and marine sciences. Within OSU lies the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a hub known for its contributions to research and education. The school champions industry-focused learning for undergraduates, while its groundbreaking online programs have placed OSU among the nation’s leaders in distance education.
One of the most visionary projects to emerge from EECS comes from the lab of Associate Professor Raffaele de Amicis. Using advanced geographic datasets and LiDAR scans, de Amicis and his team have created a digital twin of Oregon’s Elliott State Forest – a stunning, immersive recreation of one of the Pacific Northwest’s vast wilderness areas. In this virtual landscape, users become participants in the environment. They can easily manipulate time and weather, traverse rugged terrain and teleport to any point in the forest. The simulation allows users to model the effects of selective logging or full-scale clear-cutting, offering new insights into environmental impact and forest management.
Currently, the high-fidelity virtual forest encompasses a detailed rendering of 26,000 trees across a section of the Elliott State Forest. Ultimately, de Amicis aims to scale this digital twin to encompass the entire 2.8 million-tree forest and beyond. The creation of the digital forest began with detailed survey data provided by the Oregon Department of Forestry, later expanded with datasets from the Oregon State University College of Forestry. This information was processed through geographic information system (GIS) software to analyze and map environmental features in real-world coordinates. From there, game engines like Unity and Unreal were deployed to generate the forest’s striking visual fidelity, allowing for highly interactive and realistic representations…