The new Doppelgänger tool from Sidewalk Labs promises to provide real-world planners a simulation based not on some 1990-era coder’s best approximation of people, but instead one based on the terabytes upon terabytes of real-world data available in today’s digital world

“Doppelgänger enables planners to create a set of virtual households that accurately reflects real neighborhoods, cities, regions, or states, along any dimension relevant to the problem at hand,” writes David Ory, modeling lead at Sidewalk Labs, a Google-connected company launched in 2015. “Doppelgänger can create households that have accurate numbers of children, seniors, teachers, persons with disabilities, electric-vehicle owners, swing-shift workers, and so on.”