Mcity Profiles in Innovation: Parallel Domain
Parallel Domain at Mcity: Digital Twin to the Nth
By Greg McGuire, Managing Director, Mcity
Mcity launched a digital twin of the Mcity Test Facility in December 2024 to accelerate A/V development by evaluating autonomous vehicles and software virtually. It’s available, open source, on our web site.
In March 2025, we enhanced our digital twin by integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation to enable physics-based modeling of camera, lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensor data.
The startup company Parallel Domain joined Mcity as a member in January 2025; by August 2025, they’d developed a high-fidelity,“pixel-accurate” digital twin of the Mcity Test Facility using the company’s PD Replica technology.
Built entirely from drive-log data captured by the Mcity team, this is one of the largest and most detailed PD Replica locations ever created. The PD Replica simulation, combined with the real Mcity track, offers teams a unique opportunity to cross-validate results, comparing simulation runs directly with on-track testing to ensure simulated performance mirrors reality.
“We partnered with Mcity for its global credibility and instant recognizability,” said Kevin McNamara, founder and CEO of Parallel Domain. “It is the perfect showcase for how realistic our digital twin truly is. More importantly, it demonstrates how advances in simulation let teams “shift left” by testing earlier in simulation instead of waiting weeks for track time, while keeping the real Mcity track as the final validation step,” said McNamara.
The Mcity PD Replica is available to Mcity members, academic partners, and Parallel Domain customers via the PD Replica Sim API, allowing remote access to the test track.
In my view, the Mcity PD Replica immediately advances how Mcity members and research partners can test perception, planning and control in a very realistic virtual environment, and one in which they can probe the vast space created by dimensionality coupled with rarity.
The work Mcity and Parallel Domain have done together is the kind of R&D and commercialization we had in mind after two years of technical upgrades to our capabilities. This new tool improves the fidelity and scalability of AV simulations and advances industry standards for simulation testing.
Some of you may ask: why is there more than one digital twin? Are they duplicative? Competitors? Short answer: our open source tools are incredibly capable, but the commercial systems are right at the edge of innovation. The longer answer is worthy of deeper examination, but we’ll have to leave that to another day.
I’ll soon share examples of how other startups have worked with Mcity outside AV development, but this work is a terrific example of Mcity’s growing role as a makerspace serving our core mission. My thanks to Parallel Domain for their vision and hard work.