As the use of VR, AR, and MR technologies in the enterprise continues to grow, business processes across all industries from training and manufacturing to energy and AEC are changing dramatically.
To explore this trend in further detail and learn more about the importance of extended realities in the enterprise, XR Today invited UrsaLeo CEO, John Burton, to share his thoughts, insights, and predictions on how this technology is changing the industrial world.
How XR is driving Industry 4.0?
Like many technologies, Burton tells us, XR went through a hype period around the time Facebook bought Oculus. While this release was a little early for general adoption, the technology is now coming of age in the industrial world will become increasingly important over time.
With virtual reality, organizations find tremendous value in sales and marketing, training, knowledge capture, and remote operation. According to Burton, VR makes it possible to take the product to the customer and allow them to ‘see’ every detail in 3D, using visualizations that are not possible in real life.
For Burton, the arrival of XR and 3D visualization creates much greater transparency of projects, plans, ideas, and instructions, with ‘exploded’ engineering viewpoints that enhance the customer’s experience of the product in unprecedented ways.
Augmented reality, continues Burton, significantly improves processes such as triaging, maintenance, document retrieval, and planning. By overlaying information onto an operator’s view of the real world, Burton adds, AR can drastically enhance the user’s knowledge and performance by allowing them to access important information in real-time to complete tasks faster and with better success.
“With AR, multiple people can collaborate remotely on a single product using AR headsets to exchange information (sensor data, live video) in real-time from different locations all over the world,” Burton adds.
Photorealistic 3D Digital Twins
UrsaLeo, a world-leading platform that builds photorealistic 3D digital twins in VR and AR, delivers its services across the board to companies operating in energy and gas to manufacturing and construction.
According to Burton, their primary differentiation from other digital twin providers is the architecture around how they create and deliver their 3D models. Unlike other competitors, UrsaLeo keeps the model and all related data in the cloud and provide it to their clients in real-time, enabling better mobility and remote collaboration.
Moving forward, Burton imagines more digital twin providers will follow this cloud streaming module, especially once the 5G network becomes more widely available by the end of 2021.
Industrial XR 3D Visualisation Becomes Mainstream In 2021
As we approach the end of 2020 (*world lets out a massive sigh of relief*), Burton tells us that XR technology will become more mainstream in the industrial space.
“3D is becoming a part of the industrial landscape for planning simulation and operation. The changes the technology brings always start small (better training), but in our experience lead to a complete re-engineering of the processes used to run the operation as the technology spreads,” Burton adds.
Right now, we appear to be standing at the foot of a vast mountain of opportunity for businesses to innovate, differentiate, and achieve so much more than was ever imaginable just five years ago. It’s an exciting time for the enterprise, and XR Today will be here following the trend every step of the way.
