Building real-time cities and digital twins with Geopogo
Geopogo empowers project teams to make buildings and cities even better, by inventing and developing 3D visualization software tools that improve the process and outcome of design and construction. Based in Berkeley, California, Geopogo offers a suite of products for city visualization including Geopogo Cities for city-building, utilities for 3D road and city generation, and even tools for creating AR experiences.
Geopogo, a visualization platform powered by Unreal Engine and Google Maps, is built for architects, designers, and urban planners who want to create high-quality renderings and animations within real-world 3D city context. It combines photorealistic urban environments with powerful AI tools to bring designs to life fast.
The company’s work is guided by values of democratization (make it affordable and simple to use), inclusion (support better collaboration between project stakeholders), and transparency (a natural fit for an AR-focused company).
The company’s work is guided by values of democratization (make it affordable and simple to use), inclusion (support better collaboration between project stakeholders), and transparency (a natural fit for an AR-focused company).
Catching up with Geopogo
To find out more about how Geopogo strives to bring realistic, real-time 3D city environments to the world, we spoke with Mike Hoppe, Creative Director at Geopogo.
How are you using Unreal Engine?
The Geopogo team is harnessing Unreal Engine 5 for Geopogo Cities, our innovative 3D digital twin platform to place and render architectural projects in their urban context. This powerful tool enables us to craft highly detailed, interactive urban environments that bridge conceptual design and real-world execution.UE5’s exceptional graphics and robust stability are critical for rendering large-scale 3D architectural models with precision and realism. Features like real-time ray tracing and Nanite geometry enable us to create immersive digital twins, transforming how architects and developers plan, visualize, and appropriately engage stakeholders in urban development projects.
Unreal Engine 5 brings tremendous value to our company through its unmatched graphics quality, high performance, and scalability. Its ability to seamlessly process complex, data-rich environments and integrate 3D architectural models from platforms including Autodesk Revit, SketchUp, Blender, Maya, and 3ds Max ensures Geopogo Cities delivers intricate details without sacrificing speed or stability.
This boosts our workflow efficiency and elevates the quality of our deliverables, cementing our leadership in digital twin cities technology. Moreover, UE5’s versatility enables rapid iteration and adaptation to evolving project and user needs, saving time and resources while upholding exceptional standards.
Courtesy of Geopogo
How is the use of Unreal Engine beneficial for your customers?
For our customers, Unreal Engine 5 delivers stunning graphics, robust processing power, and a touch of prestige. The photorealistic visuals and fluid interactivity of Geopogo Cities allow them to explore digital twins with remarkable detail, simplifying design evaluation, issue detection, and decision-making. UE5’s performance ensures these experiences remain fast and reliable, even with expansive models, while its reputation as an industry-leading engine enhances our platform’s credibility.Ultimately, customers gain a tool that’s as visually impressive as it is practical, delivering the new ability to make informed decisions about project design within a photorealistic urban context.
What problems is Unreal Engine solving for your company?
Unreal Engine 5 tackles significant challenges for us, especially in visualization and presentation. Previously, rendering photorealistic, large-scale architectural models was a slow, resource-heavy task. With UE5’s real-time rendering and optimization tools, we—and our Geopogo Cities users—can now visualize sprawling urban environments effortlessly, even at scale. This also enhances our customers’ ability to communicate ideas clearly and persuasively to clients, engineers, and decision-makers, accelerating approvals and fostering collaboration by replacing cumbersome processes with seamless, dynamic presentations.Courtesy of Geopogo
Is the use of Unreal Engine specifically beneficial to taxpayers in some way?
For taxpayers, Geopogo Cities transforms abstract site plans and engineering jargon into vivid, interactive 3D visualizations, clarifying what their votes—or tax dollars—support, from transit hubs to parks and urban redevelopment projects.By replacing 2D drawings and limited-viewpoint renderings with dynamic, 3D digital twins and unlimited perspectives, the UE5 component of Geopogo Cities fosters confidence, empowering taxpayers to envision the future of their communities and the tangible impact of infrastructure investments.
Do you think Unreal Engine gives you a competitive advantage?
Yes, Unreal Engine 5 provides us with a distinct competitive edge through its superior graphics and performance. The striking realism and seamless fluidity of Geopogo Cities distinguishes us from the less advanced tools of our competitors, enabling us to deliver a more visually captivating and technically sound product. This attracts clients and reinforces trust in our capacity to tackle ambitious, larger-scale projects. Additionally, UE5’s real-time rendering and scalability fuel our ability to innovate and deliver faster, keeping us ahead in the digital twin and architectural visualization market.Courtesy of Geopogo
What would you say is the baseline use for Geopogo Cities?
The baseline use of Geopogo Cities is to empower architects, planners, and developers to study and showcase their building projects within the context of the surrounding cityscape. Geopogo Cities is built with Unreal Engine 5, Cesium, the Google Maps API, and an array of civic datasets, all seamlessly combined with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Designers can import their building designs from Revit, SketchUp, or other similar programs to visualize, present, and render with AI, creating powerful imagery and dynamic, engaging 3D presentations in minutes.As we continue to develop Geopogo Cities, the software will evolve to enable advanced editing and reimagining of entire cities and regions worldwide with breathtaking graphics, live simulations of vehicular traffic, pedestrians, and public transportation. You’ll be able to test real scenarios—like how a new skyscraper reshapes skylines, neighborhoods, or pedestrian paths. It’s a sandbox for experimenting and optimizing—a ‘SimCity’ for real cities, minus the cheat codes.
How do customers react to your offerings?
At Geopogo Cities, we start by learning from our customers—architects, planners, developers—about what they really need from their design presentation tools and where their tools are falling short. Often, they tell us their models are too massive to load into other rendering software, or they’re stuck figuring out how to show exterior context without wrestling with drone footage, scans, or custom modeling.We ask, “How do you show your designs in a real-world setting?” or “What’s stopping you from nailing that stakeholder pitch?” Then we fire up Geopogo Cities live, pulling their Revit or SketchUp models—however huge—into a cityscape like San Francisco or Tokyo, ready to explore in 3D.
Their jaws drop. It’s a mix of “Whoa!” and “Wait, we can do that?” They’re hooked seeing their isolated designs suddenly alive in a bustling urban context, no drones or extra modeling required. Unreal Engine is our secret weapon—its photorealistic visuals and real-time power handle those large models effortlessly. Customers can soar through their project, tweak layouts on the spot, study building shadows, or make design changes instantly.
Courtesy of Geopogo
Can you give us a real example of how Unreal Engine has been integral to your work?
Our work with Lucid Motors in Casa Grande, Arizona is a perfect showcase of Geopogo Cities in action. Lucid Motors and their digital twin team commissioned us to build a 3D city simulation engine to showcase the new Lucid Motors factory site and coordinate it with future growth plans of Casa Grande, Arizona.We pulled in GIS data for the terrain, surrounding roads, and buildings from Cesium and the Google Maps API, as well as environmental data from ESRI to highlight water reservoir locations for future city development and expansion. The city’s development department could also import architectural design models from developers to showcase developments in full 3D context and present them to the public during city council meetings.
Unreal Engine lets us simulate the whole operation: existing city context, future development planning, resource management, zoning and county parcel data, and a multitude of planning tools to visualize future growth.
This project highlighted many of the benefits of Geopogo Cities: immersive visualization sold the vision, precise simulations generated savings by avoiding costly redesigns, and the geographic context ensured it fit Casa Grande perfectly. Unreal Engine made it fast, beautiful, and actionable.
Courtesy of Geopogo
Which Unreal Engine feature is the most useful, in your opinion?
Hands down, my favorite Unreal Engine tool for Geopogo Cities is Nanite. It’s a beast for handling massive geometry—like entire cityscapes—without choking on polygon counts. In our work, we’re not just rendering a building– we’re loading New York City’s skyline or London’s sprawl, all in real-time detail. Nanite lets us drop in hyper-detailed models—say, every window on a high-rise or every tree along a boulevard—and keeps the program running smoothly for our users. For me, it’s the key to making our digital twins feel alive and practical, not just pretty. Customers can zoom from a city-wide view to a street corner without a hiccup, and that fluidity keeps them engaged and trusting the tech. It’s the backbone of our “wow, this is real” moment.Courtesy of Geopogo
Tell us about your vision for the future.
Our vision at Geopogo Cities is to turn every city into a well-planned masterpiece perfect for people to enjoy in real life. We’re not stopping at just visualization—we want full-on urban simulation where planners, architects, and even citizens can test ideas in real time. We’ve even launched a game version on the Epic Game Store where you can explore real 3D city locations, and have fun placing buildings, tweaking layouts, and roaming urban icons to build a full city sim.Picture this: a digital twin of New York where you tweak traffic lights and watch congestion melt away, or drop in a park and see how it shifts property values, all powered by Unreal Engine’s real-time engine and plugged into live GIS and traffic feeds. We’re aiming to expand our city library—hundreds of urban hubs worldwide—and add tools like AI-driven design suggestions or multiplayer collaboration, so teams can build together.
We’re proud of the community we are building around Geopogo. We’re planning to launch an exciting design competition called “Shape Your World” where we invite architects, designers, urban planners, and enthusiasts to reimagine their cities using Geopogo, and we’ve welcomed our 2025 summer trainee cohort, the future superstars of our industry that will be diving into UE5 and Geopogo Cities, having fun expanding the horizons of 3D visualization for AEC, gaming, and media & entertainment.
Ultimately, we want Geopogo Cities to be the go-to platform for designing smarter, greener, more human-centric cities. With every update, we’re bridging the gap between the reality of the present cityscape and the imagination of the future cityscape.