Welcome to the iQ3Connect Monday Morning Coffee Blog where each week we will post content related to iQ3Connect, the XR market, or the industries we serve. This post is intended to define the terms XR, AR, MR, and VR and the importance that they play for industrial enterprises.
Author: iQ3Connect
Monday Morning Coffee Blog – Introduction to iQ3Connect
Welcome to the iQ3Connect Monday Morning Coffee Blog where each week we will post content related to iQ3Connect, the XR market, or the industries we serve. This post is an intro to the blog and an overview of iQ3Connect. Stay tuned each week for new and exciting content.
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Leveraging VR/AR Technologies to Address Skill Shortages and High Workforce Turnover
People are the strength of an organization. The recent skills gap and high workforce turnover rates faced by many manufacturing and industrial enterprises are inhibiting their productivity and competitiveness. In this blog, we will discuss how the latest VR/AR solutions can help enterprises cost-effectively solve these challenges.
The Skills Gap and Transformation of Work
A study conducted by Deloitte & the Manufacturing Institute reveals that the skills gap may leave an estimated 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028 (Deloitte Study). Additionally, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution transforms the way we work, it is predicted that the new technologies driving this transformation (artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, automation, analytics, and the Internet of Things) are likely to create even more jobs than they replace. This transformation of work and increasing skills gap makes efficient training programs all the more important to ensuring future productivity and competitiveness.
Hands-On Training is Becoming Increasingly Cost Prohibitive
Physical training infrastructure, such as facilities, equipment, and the related travel and shipping costs, comprises about 40% of the average training budget for manufacturers. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as machines and facilities become more advanced, expensive, and specialized, this percentage is likely to increase. Onsite training means production must be paused or physical mock-ups must be built, neither is an appealing option. Moreover, traditional digital means such as training videos and slide decks can’t replace the hands-on training requirements of complex technical work. This means that we must look toward new technologies to help address the skills shortage.
How VR/AR Technologies Can Replace Hands-On Training
Many hands-on training programs can be cost-effectively virtualized by leveraging 3D digital assets that an organization already has access to, whether it’s CAD data from engineering or 3D scans from the facilities team. Existing videos and slide decks can be used as-is in virtual training, all while a trainee is interacting with the 3D digital models. If 3D content isn’t readily available within the enterprise, there exists several online marketplaces where models can be purchased at minimal cost. Even building a custom digital model from scratch can be more cost-effective than physical mock-ups.
Once the 3D content is on hand, many software solutions now enable non-programmers to develop complex immersive training modules without any coding. The same technicians, trainers, etc. who were building the original training program, can seamlessly create these new immersive training routines. Additionally, VR/AR solutions can now integrate directly into Learning Management Systems for uninterrupted and consistent tracking of training completion.
What are the Benefits of Deploying VR/AR Training?
VR/AR technologies offer the same cost-savings and efficiency benefits as the traditional digital tools (videos, slide decks, etc.) with the added benefit of being able to replicate many of the complexities and realism of hands-on training. It is often much more cost-effective to build a digital twin than to shut down production or build a physical mock-up. Moreover, VR/AR training can be used in training scenarios that are dangerous to physically perform such as in health, safety, and environment training. Finally, VR/AR training can reduce the overall workload on trainers, improve trainee knowledge retention, and increase reusability of training content.
Stay tuned next week for our blog discussing the different industrial training use cases for which virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are best suited.
Work of the Future: Collaboration Beyond the Flat Screen
On April 29th, 2021, I had the opportunity to speak about the Work of the Future at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In this blog post, I have summarized my talk “Collaboration Beyond the Flat Screen”, which focused on how virtual reality and augmented reality (collectively referred to as “XR”) will change the nature of remote work and training in enterprises and in the educational world. Before diving into the content, I would like to thank the MIT Industry Liaison Program and the MIT Startup Exchange for inviting me to speak at this event.
COVID upended work processes and work culture as we knew them. This pandemic has accelerated the urgency for digital transformation as business critical travel and face-to-face meetings have ground to a halt. Collaboration tools such as web conferencing have done a remarkable job in filling much of the gaps due to travel disruptions, but they are severely limited in filling the gaps for remote work and remote training when 3D data is involved. Flat (2D) screen sharing cannot replace physical interactions with the world around us. so how can we leverage upcoming technologies like XR to fill the gaps of inherently physical work and training? How can enterprises restore in-person productivity and efficiency without being in-person? And how can we do this in a sustainable way?
At iQ3Connect we are building a new-age, web-based collaboration and training platform capable of virtualizing much of the work, training, and learning that can’t be effectively virtualized by web conferencing or traditional e-learning methods. Our platform is a web-based solution empowering individuals, teams, and enterprises to create, deploy, collaborate, and learn with immersive and interactive 3D content on any VR, AR, PC, or mobile device. We are pushing collaboration beyond the flat screen, while still allowing for flat screen participation. In this way, we make iQ3Connect easy for anyone to use, regardless of which hardware they have, and thus easy for IT to deploy enterprise-wide. Let’s review some key examples of how iQ3Connect is being used to overcome the workplace challenges we all continue to face today and in the foreseeable future.
In this first example we see cross functional teams from different global locations working together in iQ3Connect in the same virtual workspace. The image is deceptively simple, but this is an engineering accurate, 1-to-1 scale digital twin of a production system with 10,000+ components. Each orange band shows the position of a participant. Anyone in this virtual workspace can independently move around, mark up issues, access and pull apart any component in the digital model. Participants can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously if they are working at different times. They are no longer bound by physical prototypes, time, and geographic barriers.
In this second example, we see iQ3Connect being used as a digital classroom for delivering instructor-led product training. As COVID has impacted training and education in physical classrooms, new technologies are needed to replicate the physical training and instruction. With iQ3Connect, subject matter experts, trainers and students are able to curate training and learning experiences without programming knowledge. In addition to instructor-led training, iQ3Connect training modules are being embedded in Learning Management Systems and MooC learning platforms like EdX for enterprise-wide, school-wide, and world-wide distribution. With iQ3Connect these organizations are less dependent on face-to-face learning, and can continue to leverage this technology to reduce travel costs even after travel restrictions have been lifted.
In this third example, iQ3Conenct is being used for live remote support. A technician at a remote site is wearing a Microsoft Hololens and can invite an expert from the home office to remotely assist in order to solve a technical issue. With live remote support, organizations can more readily address issues in the field without having to send in entire teams, and field technicians can easily rely on experts from anywhere in the world.
At iQ3Connect, we are already powering the Work of the Future.
