Digital Twin of Beijing

With the growing penetration of information and communication technologies, social media platforms have become one of the most frequently used virtual spaces in daily life, producing spatiality with new logic and structure. However, few studies have examined the difference of visiting preferences in virtual space due to the lack of proper benchmarks constructed from physical space. The quantity of geo-tagged views, likes, comments, shares embedded in TikTok filming locations was used to measuring virtual and physical visiting activities (VVAs, PVAs), providing a perfect opportunity to clarify the virtual visiting differences. Built environment components are regarded as the objects of reference and their relationships with VVAs and PVAs were examined separately, and virtual visiting preferences were revealed as the following three main points: 1. VVAs are less associated with the built environment, due to people's indirect perception of physical elements. 2. Components that people are more familiar with in physical space and could shape impressive public city images, such as landmarks and urban nodes, are dramatically enhanced in virtual space. 3. Components that could be easily perceived in physical space but hard to present through visual medium, such as functional diversity, are far less critical in virtual space.