I wanted to talk to a turbine, so I spent 18 years building NthDimension

When I was around thirteen or fourteen, my father took me inside a power plant.

I remember looking at the turbine and wanting to talk to it.

I had grown up fascinated by science fiction, so what I imagined was probably closer to HAL 9000 than anything I could properly articulate:

Hey turbine, how are you feeling today? Why is your hot reheat not doing well?

I obviously knew nothing about digital twins, semantic models, telemetry architectures or knowledge graphs.

But the question stayed with me:

What would a computer actually need to know about something before you could have a meaningful conversation with it?

I've spent a surprising amount of my professional life circling that question.

I thought the problem was 3D

NthDimension began around 2008.

I was working in industrial automation, including fire-detection systems using pre-addressed sensor cables in highway tunnels and power plants.

Industrial visualization was predominantly 2D. At the same time, I had always been fascinated by video games and science-fiction interfaces.

I wanted something different.

Why couldn't I walk through a three-dimensional representation of an industrial installation and interact with the equipment directly?

So I started building what became NthDimension.

For a while I thought I was building a 3D engine.

As the renderer improved, and as I worked on more industrial systems, I discovered that rendering wasn't really the difficult problem.

I could render a turbine.

I could attach live measurements to it.

I could make it look impressive.

But a beautiful 3D model of a turbine is still not a turbine.

Without the substance behind the visualization, I had made a toy.

Telemetry isn't understanding

One of the defining influences on how I came to think about this was my work with Fred D. Lang and Exergetic Systems.

Fred developed the Input/Loss Method for power-plant performance analysis and EX-FOSS, a steam-generator simulation system.

Exergetic Systems taught me power-plant thermodynamics.

For more than a decade, part of my work involved keeping alive and eventually modernizing software around their engineering systems.

One particularly memorable component was an old VB6 application we called the Blue Panel .

It sat between different worlds: live plant telemetry, Microsoft Excel and Exergetic's engineering executables.

Keeping that ecosystem working gave me an education that went considerably beyond software engineering.

It taught me that:

Telemetry isn't understanding.

A temperature measurement is an observation.

Ten thousand measurements are ten thousand observations.

They don't automatically explain why a plant is behaving the way it is.

For that, measurements need context. They need relationships and history. Often they need a model capable of explaining what those observations mean.

At roughly the same time, NthDimension was teaching me the inverse lesson:

A 3D model without operational meaning was a toy. Telemetry without a model was just data.

Somewhere between those two problems was what I actually wanted to build.

What makes a turbine a turbine?

Return to my teenage question:

Why is your hot reheat not doing well?

Today we could connect a language model to a process historian and make something that appears to answer that question.

But the language interface doesn't solve the underlying representation problem.

The system first needs to know which turbine we're discussing.

It needs to know what the turbine contains and what it is connected to.

It needs measurements, units and quality.

It needs current state and history.

It needs models capable of interpreting those observations.

And eventually it needs to distinguish between what was observed , what was calculated , what was inferred , and what simply isn't known.

That is much closer to what interests me about digital twins than placing telemetry beside a 3D model.

The visualization can be extremely useful.

But the visualization isn't the twin.

So what exactly is NthDimension?

This is where I've always had difficulty putting NthDimension into a conventional product category.

It contains a substantial real-time renderer and editor, geometry and modeling systems, animation, terrain, weather, procedural generation, audio and simulation infrastructure.

Calling it a game engine therefore isn't wrong.

It's incomplete.

A significant part of its architecture also comes from industrial automation, telemetry, process historians, power-generation systems and operational software.

Calling it a digital-twin platform isn't entirely wrong either.

That's incomplete too.

The description I've settled on is:

NthDimension is an engine for building computational worlds whose entities can have identity, semantics, state, relationships, behavior, history and physical representation.

Rendering is one consumer of that world.

Simulation is another.

An editor is...