Digital Twins, the Metaverse, and Augmented Reality

all right so let me get started with the intro my name is DDA I'm I'm the technical lead for the developer Community the HP developer community and together with me is Fred and um and duni that will help with uh the Q a and the chat um today we have a session about digital twins uh about the metaverse augmented reality the title is pretty long I won't read it out we have three speakers in order of appearance we'll have James and Gary and then Marcus and um and this is uh our June Manchester name and uh before we get started I'll uh I'll get uh through a few slides we have those mentions since a couple of years now it's a monthly program we try to have interesting thought leadership vendor and product diagnostic sessions um unfortunately I don't have a topic for July I have to admit that the HP discover event as as made things a little bit complicated it's happening next week I was able to squeeze in this session in June but I don't have yet a session for July hopefully I'll meet a lot 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much good morning afternoon and evening everyone I want to thank all of you for joining and I want to thank also DDA and Jeffrey and the developer Community for contacting me and the other panelists for this opportunity to present here and share our perspectives on this exciting topic of digital twins the metaverse an augmented reality that has been evolving through many decades and solely becoming real thanks to Consumer grade Technologies and creators who push for Innovation and aren't afraid to try new things is my personal opinion but I think we will continue to blend our physical and digital worlds and we are still in the early stages of this so there's a lot of room to innovate and push these boundaries a bit of what I'm going to be going over uh it'll be some background and some terms and applications then I'll show you a part of a project I worked on with Gary's team then I will discuss a bit on the process for creating game Assets in some of the contexts with game engines and then some closing thoughts before passing this on to Gary who will go into more detail about the uh the project we worked on as well as others and then to Marcus we'll discuss the bigger picture of what uh where this all is going so a bit of background in my experience and why I'm here to speak to you about these topics my background is in architecture and human computer interaction I'm also a self-taught game developer currently I'm working full time at hpe as well as wrapping up my PhD where I look at the effects of visualization and navigation on perception and spatial memory in the real world particularly for training emergency Personnel in urban environments uh to share a little bit about how I found myself here where art technology and human behavior all kind of come together it didn't start with architecture I started with art and I've always been the creative type primarily drawn to you know copying things that I saw with a pencil and then moving on to 3D modeling and trying to recreate things from The Real World as it turns out architecture has always been about the blending of creativity and technology and human factors and then ended up being the perfect fit perfect fit uh for me in the field has been right in the middle of this technological Revolution for decades so Architects and designers have traditionally used hand drawings and to design and communicate about buildings but today they're using 3D VR and all the most immersive media that they can since they're typically shaping very expensive and complex things that don't really exist yet the role of an architect is pretty Dynamic you have to have an eye for design be interested in human factors as well as technology and lately clients are asking for increasingly immersive representations to let them make important decisions where speed and sustainability are also a huge deal in my world being involved in research our job is to explore how these technologies will shape the profession in terms of the design process communication building and simulating every possible characteristic of a bill of a building or the built environment so immersive technologies have been a game changer imagine being able to build stuff digitally without blowing your budget or being able to walk through a space with before it's built with VR we can simulate how a building will perform whether it's cozy enough whether it's accessible whether it gets too much sun and being involved in this research has led me to lots of collaborations with different groups who are also very interested in spatial simulations and spatial understanding in immersive environments some of these being in medicine in transportation computer science so it isn't just Architects that are interested in in this blending of the Two Worlds I've gotten to show some of this work at meta headquarters and some other International conferences that have uh that have opened my eyes to what what the what everybody's doing out there uh so to back to my role at hpe I'm a ux researcher and the CDs team in storage a lot of the work we do involves getting into the customers shoes and trying to understand and improve their end-to-end experience as we continue to shift onto an as a service model with our products and services our team identifies pain points and opportunities and we look for ways of making this experience better in addition to this work a smaller part of my time is spent in strategic Innovation and Outreach where we research develop and test prototypes that can help customers as they interact with HP products so far we've experimented with pocs involving Automation and voice interaction mixed reality for data center use cases artificial intelligence and gamification of training for our customers so to clarify a few terms uh I like to you know these are things that we're constantly hearing about I like to think of these almost as the an evolution of a technology that then gets incorporated into the next one and and somehow we we have to come up with new terms to to understand what's happening uh so I like to think of these almost as feature introductions that eventually get Consolidated and standardized uh with every feature introduction sometimes it involves the inclusion of a new type of optic or sensors and data that blend the real world and digital world closer to each other so to start with VR it encompasses everything from monitor based displays to head mounted displays today it typically assumes that a person's head rotation is tracked and synced to a virtual camera or environment and positional tracking has become the standard as well today when in the past only you know head rotation was what was what people were calling VR augmented reality is or ar is a bit different that introduces digital content into the real world through some type of uh like see-through device you could think of it it doesn't have to be a head mounted display but it does introduce the the idea that now you are augmenting the physical world with uh digital content in some way mixed reality puts a bit these together and it also incorporates the spatial tracking so now you're not only moving digital content around uh your field of vision but you're also adding it to the physical space as you move in three dimensions to the world and then XR is a term for extended reality and appears to be kind of a catch-all name for all these Technologies and where they're headed So eventually being this uh you know seamlessness between uh the digital and the physical the metaverse has been described as the next stage for mobile internet with an emphasis on the interconnectedness we will experience with other people I think of it as the point where Computing becomes increasingly spatial via immersive Technologies and wearables and space becomes increasingly digital via 3D scanning iot AI Etc and the current ecosystem of platforms there will be when you put all these together and how people create different communities and different spaces based on this uh this interaction on the side you can see some of the areas where these immersive Technologies are having a big impact the top one refers to digital twins which is a very broad term that can vary in scope and scale but it's growing tremendously since a lot of the world's infrastructure is crucial and expensive and requires as many Expert Eyes on it as possible digital twins are basically a physical asset and their digital counterpart would allow that allows you for monitoring management even simulation and interfacing of different actions uh with both objects imagine performing actions on a physical object and having the virtual One update and vice versa performing actions on the on the virtual object and having the the physical object update at the same time so and some of these other categories are areas that I've seen a lot of change happening and and very important applications that are uh becoming very regularly used by immersive technology users so here's a quick example of the CAC theater in my room EX in the my room XR app which Gary's team developed and I was able to be involved in as well I took this video during techcon as Gary and Jeffrey fujer who presented last month and they were demoing this to different uh people during their poster session I only want to show a few features of the applications at this stage since it's continuing to continue to evolve and Gary will will speak a bit more uh about some of that uh so what you're seeing here is a view from my point of view as I'm wearing a headset from the safety of my house here in Missouri and the other people present are people who are attending the poster session at techcon in Florida uh you can see the environment you can see multiple people interacting with each other in the same space and as I mentioned this uh environment is a replica of the CAC theater in Houston we haven't implemented this yet but we have the capability of linking this digital theater to the physical one in Houston and having you know a real digital twin so let me skip a little bit to a minute 30 here oops Yeah here you can see uh Gary began streaming a video directly from techcon into our space and uh we are able to see it as well as someone uh you know sharing a slide presentation there here you can see me in a second bring up the UI for the application hopefully we can see more there and it lets me it gives me the ability to change spaces in the theater you can see people can move around interact with each other they see me I see them doing clap little presentations and then let me skip forward a bit to the video there it is and then there's other features like uh you know showing green screen videos on here to do product uh demos and uh just like the theater in Houston we can show any kind of video on this screen uh of any aspect ratio from a centered video like this to something that covers the whole 180 degrees to have a fully immersive experiences and uh you know synchronous watch parties with with other parties all right so let me move on to the next slide so uh you can just watch this video there's nothing uh uh that'll happen there's just a sort of uh view of uh of the behind the scenes of the of the environment where we created this so what does it take to do something like this uh some general principles that you have to keep in mind across most development platforms are to you know think of a game engine typically the the largest ones out there are unity and unreal uh I like Unity particular because it is a bit more developer friendly hardware and device developers like meta and apple tend to Target as the case for Unity a lot faster than they do other engines uh most engines you can typically use for free for personal use and a lot of cases that are below a certain Revenue so there are great uh great to learn a lot of these Concepts you have to become familiar with how space Works in these environments you have to understand uh positioning and rotations you need to understand object hierarchies you know what what object depends on on which one uh things like that which take a little bit but with time it becomes very intuitive and you also need to understand how to optimize your assets many mobile apps have very limited memory therefore you cannot you know create all the all the detail that you would like so you have to find all kinds of tricks to to simulate uh detail in your applications one thing to also note is that game engines are not only for games think of them as a Sandbox that pulls together all the low-level resources and dependencies like opengl you know system inputs Hardware is the case File handling all these kind of things and packages things up nicely for you once you are completed and ready to Output your project to uh you know up to a different to a device or a different platform it saves a ton of time and you can output to Android Windows iOS PlayStation if you want if you have the right accounts for that for this project we built everything from the ground up except some sdks which help us use the hand features that you saw in the avatars within Oculus devices that support it I was responsible for creating the game assets and communicating with the other developers in Gary's team Uh Kevin and Marielle who need it you know we needed to go back and forth on the different assets that we needed very iteratively so so that we can make this all function so to bring my room and any standard Unity projects into uh how it works it typically has a project which contains a ton of files and then you use these files to craft a scene um and then you each scene doesn't duplicate these objects but it uses references to them to you know make your project files smaller and eventually be able to scale your application to to a very largely agree because you're going to be reusing a lot of these assets in the example here I only had to model one chair for the theater and I was able to multiply multiple times within the scene so that it doesn't create a ton of geometry that's going to be loaded into the application we can optimize a single 3D model of a seat there and that's something to keep in mind not all 3D files are the same some you know we're used to seeing a lot of 3D scanning technology these days and and some pretty awesome 3D files but those are not optimized for for game engines lots of times they need to go through a pretty complex process of optimizing them simplifying them and I'm going to share a bit of that in the next few slides to think uh at the end of the day a 3D object is a combination of points in space connected with edges that form triangles and these triangles form you know quads or planes and then with these planes you end up creating you know the facets of the 3D model that uh lets you uh you know visualize images on these planes almost like uh picture frames that you can slap on stickers onto and then you use this to to create different hierarchies of objects for example if you need a pivot point on a door if you need a button to be pressed things like that you need to be very cognizant of the of the physical qualities that you're trying to imitate with your fit with your digital object similarly if you're going to have a a soft object for example a human body or cloth they're different considerations you need to have so that you can do this uh well so don't think that any kind of 3D object works there's lots of different things they need to do in the back end so this brings me a little bit to the scripting side the most game engines have a scripting or programming language that you can use to make your scenes and objects come to life in the case of unity it uses c-sharp I really enjoy it since it's an object-oriented language and it makes the you know objects very uh intuitive to understand and the behaviors kind of uh understandable and it's not the most computationally efficient way but for the sake of these types of applications it's very useful type of language the way that I like to understand it is to you know think of a category of objects for example in this application I may need a a type of uh object that is a human with whom I need to perform certain actions like have a conversation send a file connect on social media and then I might have another type of object to stall a Furniture so with Furniture maybe I want to select it I want to move it change its material I only have to write two classes for this and I can instantiate them you know thousands of times depending on how many objects I have and then let's say I have a new type of furniture that has a particular feature like a collapsible table so I need to be able to collapse this table I don't need to uh you know create a new script for it I can just extend my furniture class into taking on this interaction of collab collapsation without having to write a whole bunch of code it's the it's very similar to how how we work with Real World objects and it's a it's a pretty intuitive way of working with uh this type of interactive and immersive environments so let me sorry for the fast video here I wanted to speed it up but it's uh this is the video that we were sent by uh by Kua who is uh who works at the cic in Houston and this is an example of the material that I use to be able to recreate this space another type of content that we use Jeffrey contacted the Architecture Firm that was in charge of Designing this building and we were able to get the Revit files now I've worked with Revit files before you know thanks to my architecture past and as I mentioned these files are not optimized for game engines they are a collection of complex geometry and information that only works well within Revit which is an Autodesk application and uh and it's a building information modeling tool it's very useful for digital twin like technology and for calculating materials in a project but it is not useful at all if you want to just visualize a photorealistic representation of it the great images that you see in the middle Center show you the beginning of me trying to optimize the 3D model uh when we got it it was over a gigabyte and I couldn't even open in a lot of applications because every you know every point every line every triangle everything needs to be represented by the 3D application but I was able to painstakingly delete unnecessary geometry an example of how bad this can be is like a door hinge in a Revit file can have you know threads on on it can have screws it can have bevels that don't really matter to us at the end of the day but one door hinge can have millions of polygons necessarily so when you're developing game-like applications you need to keep in mind these things and find ways of cheating uh the the level of detail on the bottom right the greenish model is me beginning to model over that information with simplified geometry and uh with a reference of the 3D files in the video sent from KOA where we asked them to get us you know we wanted to get the I wanted to get details of the textures as well as some context so those are the the details that I needed to have from him and he was very generous and and he gave descriptions and and was very good and thorough about showing us how the the theater was laid out but that was all we used uh these two sources were the how we were able to recreate the the space the rest of the process is very standard and game asset creation workflows once you have your simplified geometry uh here let's Show an example of a Podium which was the last minute I add on last week actually uh so first you need to unwrap it once you have your geometry you unwrap it and those are the and you create seams by adding those little you see those red lines in the model those let you play the model into a 2d one by one square which you can see next to it in that bluish screen and then once you have this template for the 3D model you can begin to layer in all the different layers of information uh for example here I'm showing a bit of lighting information on that black and white image and on the right of that one I'm showing the the texture of it where I decide hey this is wood this is lighter wood maybe I want the you know the the logo to be green and uh when you load these into a game engine or when you develop your application all of these independent layers are synchronously shown uh when you're running the application and here's some uh some of the models that we created that I created for this application and uh each one of these has to go through this process otherwise they won't look good they won't interact with the lighting they won't have shadows all the little cues that you need to to make an object look realistic so here I'm showing you a screenshot of the unity game engine uh you can only open to get give you a bit on the context and how this is done you can only open one project at a time at the bottom here you can see the there's a project and you have a series of folders and you can see your files so here there's a a whole bunch of scripts because I'm in my scripts file and then uh the you can see the scene up here so this is where you would find your all of your 3D models and then you start composing your scene which starts creating this list of everything you have available and then on the right side here you can see it's a contextual inspector so I have selected the podium and you can see the different properties that this object has and every object that you put in the scene will have a transform which defines its position rotation and scale and space and then different things that just let you visualize it you know apply materials all these kind of things to it and then the way you make it come to life is by creating different scripts and interactions you can animate objects different kinds like this but these are all appended to this object to Via components so if you create a script that for example is uh some feature of this Podium all you have to do is write a script and then you add it here and then you can access all of the features that all the variables here within this object or you can also link it to other objects and interactions they may be occurring in your scene on the right here you see a script opened in visual studio uh that was created within this project and then within the game engine itself you have this play button that lets you see how your game will be once it's deployed to your application but uh you know since we are dealing a lot with different headsets you know maybe AR devices or mixed reality devices uh even though you can emulate them within the unity environment I would recommend you know trying on these things and trying by yourself because there's going to be a lot of things that need to be considered uh when you're designing apps for immersive sort of content that you won't notice if you just do everything from your desktop you have to put them on and try it and then go back and forth so it's a very iterative process in terms of interaction as well when you're doing this so some closing thoughts I would say try to find teams of people who are excited about this type of work I learned a bunch working with Gary's team as they have a more formal development background than I do and they were able to integrate a lot of things that would have taken me a long time to figure out like the networking and some of the video streaming uh things like that that was great and then it's also very important to keep up with the the latest tools and techniques as they continue to evolve and there's no tutorial on how to create you know a cic replica it's all a combination of different things that need to come together at the end um and I know that I didn't mention AI a lot but it's part of this discussion and there are many efforts at simplifying a lot of the different uh parts of this whole process that you saw from writing code to generating images to creating 3D models with prompts I don't think AI will be able to understand how an object is supposed to behave yet and we need to be observed you know we need people to to do that but definitely keep an eye out on all these AI tools that are coming out that are eliminating some of these very tedious tasks I haven't seen anything yet that gets you from a virtual scan to a functional game asset and I'm not sure that's anytime soon but but it's possible and last but not least be relentlessly curious push yourself to develop uh in these immersive Technologies and I'm going to hand this off to the next speaker which is Gary orsolini who will be talking about some other aspects of these projects great great um Thanks James um and first of all let me um just thank thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit about what we've been doing in this space and um we're kind of a consumer if you will uh uh what this one you know worked at James has created the scene we've had a great partnership and I heartily endorse his comments about finding people that are um eager to work in this space I know we James has a day job and so he loves this stuff so he was able to um through Jeff was here get the uh connection to get the diagrams to create the scene that we've Incorporated so what I want to quickly talk about is how we took that scene and how we turned it into something that's actually in the metastore now in app lab so we we have pushed it out there and so we've got this pipeline of taking this asset and actually getting it into a place where customers uh can consume it and so this slide here just very quickly so how did we get to where we are um we've been involved with collaboration uh for over 24 years we created our first um uh it was called uh the virtual classroom in 1999 we did it in Java we actually partnered with um Xerox park there was a gentleman in in Xerox park named Pavel Curtis he was like one of the original authors of dungeon and dragons in Java and they called over to HP way back in 99 and said did we want to work with them so we did and we basically uh created in Java our first we called it e-learning on tap and it was for education to be able to do virtual uh education back uh in 99 so the technologies have changed throughout the years and what I have on this quick slide just coming from that 30 000 foot level is we basically have our desktops uh you know written in um basically uh C plus plus our servers are all written in C plus plus so we have mac Linux and windows on the left we have uh our Android our IOS and Android and um and even Unity uh in the AR space on some of the wearables there and then on Oculus C sharp and the unity and so we have the ability to work in that space and then on the browser in you know personal web apps and so on so the technologies have evolved but what this slide is saying is what we've created is an environment where in any one of those uh devices or on any one of those clients you can be in the same meeting right so this was a request that came started to come from our customers that use our technology uh and they said we've got all these different solutions and is it possible in one environment to be uh say unawareable uh on a uh this is one of the large oil companies that use our software say on a hands-free voice activated wearable and I have a picture of that next can you be able to stream the live collaboration off a hands-free voice activated wearable into a VR because our executives are meeting say with oculus is on around the table can you make it work and so we started about a year and a half ago to get involved with that and that's what we have today we have the ability on any one of these clients to be in the same meeting at the same time and have full up collaboration and so that's where we are today and if we go to the next slide this is kind of how over the many months I've kind of boiled down um the ability to talk about the metaverse and James talked about the metaverse I started to see on people's business card this extended reality so for for me for us the um it breaks down into these categories the assisted reality and the assisted reality is really the ability to put your software it takes a device it can be a mobile device or a phone but we're on a lot of the wearables right it takes a device it takes a network and it takes software and so we're agnostic on the devices but we have the software and about nine years ago when um Google Glass came out we we kind of created or invented visual remote guidance and that's been really where we've seen most of our business in the sense that companies especially when covid-19 hit and folks couldn't travel there was a big Boon there but it's really as you can see on a hands free voice activated wearable or even hpe uses it with phones on you know customers on phones you basically can avoid sending your smes out to a point where they need to fix something and we have a lot of multinational companies that are using our software on many of these wearables so for example this wearable in the upper left is uh the real where they call it an HMT head mounted tablet it's a full up hands-free voice activated device it's probably one of only about three and they've probably sold close to a hundred thousand of those so it's been a very successful device and with our software on it visual remote guidance we call that assisted reality because you can have your your person on site anywhere say on an oil rig collaborating back with the experts the smes anywhere in the world and this is where some of these large companies said we're using this assisted reality but we'd also like to bring that live collaboration into a VR space and so that's where we started into Unity about 18 months ago and um you know that jumps down to the virtual reality where we've done that in Unity on the Oculus our first uh scene was the one that's shown here around a room and then in collaboration with James and the CICS we've now have this digital twin theater and actually the CICS in hpe there's seven of them around the world it stands for the customer information center they're going to start piloting using this environment this digital twin in the CICS because they have you know eight seats in each one with the Oculus and they're going to be uh bringing customers in and putting them in into this environment so that's kind of the virtual reality side and then we've also gone back and started into some augmented reality on devices like the new Digi lens and the magic leap 2 and in unity we've been doing some work to bring some augmented reality Solutions in this space so this is the way we kind of Define the extended reality space assisted augmented and virtual and if we go to the next couple slides this is going to reinforce a little bit of what um what James was saying so we found that the VR collaboration apps they're kind of hard to use you have to learn how to do the controllers and now I'm particularly talking about virtual reality and on the Oculus you have to use the controllers and and and you have to figure out how to get into a room so we feel that with the app that we've put my room uh HP my room XR it's in the app lab right now we can put a link in there folks want to try it out is that we've simplified it in a number of ways first we basically don't use the controllers we use the meta avatars and so you get a meta account you get your avatar you're able to come in hands-free and this is a screen that shows you a little bit of the hands and that's kind of the um the second point is we've interfaced it with a set of menus that let you use your fingers point to content that's uh in the room and you simply can invoke different type of content be it slides pictures video and so on so we think we simplified getting in the room when you put on your headset you can put a key in and you simply would come into a room and then you can use the content in there and uh make it happen across all the devices I had in the prior slide if we go to the next Slide the other thing that James showed in James it was an awesome that you showed it in video this is kind of a green screen concept and be it a video or whatever we can make it manifest in the next screen moving quickly in in the time frame here is to bring in models this is one we struggled a little bit with with the you know bringing in um baby basically uh um a gltf file the models are large and unless you decimate them for performance we still haven't cracked the code of how to make a real-time model in terms of making it perform at least in the Oculus space am I last slide is about the digital theater and you saw the live video from James this is again what's going to be used in our CICS with customers we're pretty excited about that the latest thing we did is you can drag in um within hpe we have a very cool video that got put out by Dr go explaining Ai and large language models it's about five minutes and you can simply drop that in drag and drop in and then the video will play on the big screen you can put about 25 people in this um in this room as of late um we we have a couple podiums up in front so people can be in the front and looking back at the audience and just about a week ago I said James could we get some podiums and so James basically created those podiums we stuck them up front but to talk about the iterative nature of it when I saw it they were a little oranges James so this is the iterative nature when you put in an asset you have to play with it and you refine it and then we're going to have that completed um and so we're pretty excited about that but that's our experience of bringing um say a virtual scene like the cic one here that James worked so hard on passing it over to our team incorporating it into our application and making it viable to be used uh in an easy way with the hands-free avatars from meta so I'm going to stop there and that's been our experience with uh trying to bring VR and some of the other Technologies to life fantastic thank you Gary before I go into my part which is just kind of putting some context around around the metaverse and so on I wonder whether we might want to pause and see whether we want to pick some questions from the Q a or whether anybody wants to to put anything else in uh from from the the questions that are raised for you know or anything to to James and Gary okay um I'm going to pick one then which is from uh David about how practical would it be to create a digital twin of an hpe product including the sheet metal Plastics pcbs and components one that could be assembled disassembled slicer Etc um the overly detailed 3D files are available the account should be automated the conversion to a usable format uh the results could be transformational for working product issue resolution in the factory at the customer couldn't agree more David I think that's uh I think it's a doable thing I think wherever there's a will there's a way and I think James and Gary have certainly shown our capabilities and that spaces in hpe and that those things could be realized and I think there's a huge um opportunity for us to be able to create not just 3D representations but 3D representations so people could interact with that could be support that could be customers that could be in a pre-sales environment that could be working on where for placement in terms of heat dissipation all kinds of good stuff um to create a digital model that exists in time so we could fast forward and go back again and say hey how did this thing work how did it perform Etc under different circumstances I think is one of the one of the promises of the digital twin that kind of opportunity and I'll talk about that a bit more so um okay let's have a look here so uh can this be used for internal training yeah I think that's uh that's an excellent question and Gary I wondered you're nodding is that something you'd like to take yeah absolutely um this is available I could say um the version with the theater as well as the other scene that was just around the table um that's available actually um in the metastore uh as an app lab so that could be picked up and used and we can pretty much offer that to anyone um that wants to kick the tires on it so absolutely so then it would be the use cases like you know it's wide open to help evolve how it could be effectively here so now we have we have a vehicle it's taken a while to get the vehicle ready and now we need to get in there and use it and iterate on it because I think it's emerging and we're very open um to very quickly trying to iterate and add things and and try to not perfect it but just evolve it right to the to where it is useful and people want to get involved with it so um yeah absolutely fantastic thank you Gary I see one coming from Chris here the people using this technology for collaboration tend to keep using it or do they try it as a novelty but if not find it practical yeah new toys right um so I'm gonna take part of that but James Gary feel free to jump in with your positions I think that when people are using this and I think the BMW smart Factory is a good example uh when one invests time in doing these things and commitment then it's not a pickup use it throw it away type thing uh there's a commitment of time resource money effort going into these um and I think that I'm going to stick with that BMW smart Factory you know they're not they're not going to stop using that that becomes something they can use for their smart factories and then disassemble and reassemble for battery factories for different locations for all sorts so once you've created one of these arguably there are a lot of building blocks that can be reused and repurposed to continue along that Journey James Gary what's your point of view on that my my view is that you know whenever you find an application that really uh benefits from this third the level of Third Dimension uh you will find that people will continue to use it uh and it's just kind of seeing where that is in terms of our industry I can see it people I can see a lot of people using it in uh in training in uh you know assets and infrastructure management that seems to be you know when you have assets distributed across the world you know we uh it's uh useful to to understand the spatial relationships and there's something that looking at it on a screen won't just uh won't won't cut it so think as as these Technologies become more more seamlessly integrated with the things that we're currently doing we'll find ourselves uh working in VR one from my experience uh I've used it for a lot of content Creation in in VR because it's so much easier to you know to work with your hands rather than a mouse and clicking uh and I'm seeing a lot of that happening in the creative creative side of things but it's all also happening a lot in the uh you know urban planning world where people need to have this understanding where you're looking at different uh you know views uh you need to have that point of view and I just need to I think that whenever our industry starts seeing the value of these different things and the detail level of detail you can get to it'll be more more commonplace cool thank you Gary anything you'd like to add to that yeah I mean it's a great question and I mean we're we're the kind of the choir you know in some sense but you know is it fair to say the jury's out you know it what's the cash value of that is it novelty or is it uh real use and I think now we finally have a vehicle that's easy to get um and try and I I hope as people use it and give us feedback one of the things is how easy is it to use like so I have my my Oculus here and I literally can put it on it says power up and I can click and be in the room and start to get on with the discussion you know like is that new Podium is it the right color and so I think that's what we've worked towards is to make it easy to get in uh make it easy to use and now we're at that point so what's the next step so I think training is a very interesting space if we can crack the models interactive models in real time I think there's some value to doing that over a flat you know Zoom or it teams meeting you know session so I think there's some things to figure out uh from that performance side but I I do think training and education but we actually use it for collaboration to get in there and talk about ideas too so anyway um we just need more people to try it and give us feedback I think is the answer in general right in the whole industry absolutely I couldn't agree more so so thank you for the observation of Promethean AI definitely something for people to take away in that space um and just to finish off on the training side you know putting people into new or dangerous situations but being able to do it in a virtual so they can learn from that so that when they have to engage in those kinds of activities um I think that's that's an immediate case in terms of training so not only internally but uh things like that we've got we've got about five minutes um and I'm gonna Whistle Stop through some of this so the word I'm going to use most for this will be the word next and James thank you for driving so um this is just put a little bit of context around this for people who um you know are wondering what some of this is about um about equally if if you're already okay with this and familiar then don't feel you need to stick around for this part so um yeah business is a racing towards a very different future we can all see that I'm all aware of that um James next please so just some observations here um the mess of us you know what I said look at this a year ago there were people who said there's only one method of us so people said no there are lots of metabolism and someone said well it's capital M if it means the one metaverse and lower K and I think really are we talking about capitalization um I think what this is really saying is we're still figuring out as we go along we do know people have started it we do know that there's a lot of noise um and we've also got the Press you know one minute Facebook are all in and call themselves meta the next moment they're all in an AI but they've kind of stuck with a name it's a bit like having you know your ex partner's name tattooed on your arm um and then then you've broken up uh so okay what do you do with that um but it's about experience right it's also an opportunity to to build um a more sustainable inclusive future and you're seeing things like this where people are saying look let's go and look at situations and and allow people to immerse themselves you know what it's like with the creepy the Sahara and the sahab what it's like as as islands in the Pacific are seeing rising sea levels and preserving those for the future and so on uh and so they're all those kind of things going on next slide please all right um and this this is a watch word I mean okay it was written by screenwriters but hey they wrote some pretty good stuff people come for all the things they can do and stay for all the things they can be and that's from Ready Player one but actually I think and I think I'm not alone amongst my colleagues are saying that that's probably a pretty good watchword for the um for the consumer metaverse so we got through we've got the consumer we've got the the commercial and we've got the industrial I'll probably leap more towards the industrial because it is considered to have the higher rates of adoption um and be more uh immediate as it were yeah I was at an organization yesterday in the Aerospace not a big Aerospace company and they were talking about digital Twitter they were talking about modeling uh aircraft and aircraft components and so on so um it's quite pervasive uh next slide please James uh and the one after that if you don't mind so what is it um the most of us is a layer of digital content that connects the 3D World with the physical world uh I've actually taken this from this I should accredit this actually to someone from Accenture but uh so mayor Culper on that but I think that's the best summary of what it is okay it's this abstraction of this this sort of this layer that puts those two bits together that means augmented reality extended reality virtual reality uh the whole gamut all of those pieces all have a part to play in this whether that's overlays of of the virtual onto the physical whether that's assisting uh people you know through wearables Etc um whether that's digital twins um and uh interactivity within those and so on so next slide please cheers uh so yeah hey not just for you okay it's not just the headsets but but for the wearables but that's a key part of it but we should think you know what sits beyond that so next slide please James okay so yeah I've covered that so if we could just just pop through don't worry I'm not trying to actually get to the end of this uh because I don't think we're going to but I think the really interesting stuff uh in terms of what we're doing you know James and Gator did a wonderful thing on that so this is where we see the industrial metaverse it's got the greatest growth potential it's got lots of real world cases as we can see here no we're not going to read off all of those but as a thing it has applicability in a wide variety of areas um and James talked about cities and City modeling um as the big city skylines fan and I think I've racked up 2 000 hours and I'm anxiously looking forward to the the release of City skylines too the ability to create alternative worlds from for me it's pleasure but to create those and say okay what if we do this what if we build our airports this way what if we design our stores this way Etc what if we fashion these things our city our flow of people our flow of traffic Etc how does that look how do we solve problems you know lack of public transportation in many many cities is a huge problem um next slide please Joseph so next slide please total address for Market what we're saying is that this in its variety of forms you know this isn't just a flash in the pan we see that across the course of the next five ten years these are significantly large markets um that people will want to address with Hardware with software Etc next slide please James and I'm counting down the seconds here so I'm just going to finish off really on this digital twin part okay so it's it's formed of three parts you've got the real world entity itself the thing the virtual representation the data that connects the two and I'm gonna I'm gonna finish on this Slide by saying here in the UK where I live we had our first 40 degree Centigrade summer so what's that 106 in Fahrenheit um but we didn't build our infrastructure in this country for those kinds of conditions for those desert type temperatures and so on um but the problem we've got is that we're going to have those so but if we can model our bridges our roads our services Etc and understand what these changing temperatures Etc um are going to be like it'll be able to inform us of What kinds of changes we need to make to support the current and build for the future um and I'm going to stop there on that one just with that as a kind of pause point for us all to think about and hopefully that's been useful I uh I'll certainly learn some stuff from from James and Gary as always do and thank you very much for your time thanks everyone I think that was a very interesting uh session obviously we need more time it's not the first time we end up the session saying that we need more time we might need to adapt one day and extend that by 30 minutes or something but anyway anyway thanks for to our speakers I think that was a very interesting topic covered in different angles and that's always good and thanks to the audience I put up the end of session poll give us some feedback that's a good way for us to understand if you like this kind of uh of sessions and again thank you to our speakers thank you everyone for joining we will try to get you some more sessions over the summer I don't have any yet to to display but I'm doing my best and uh I'll I'll see you in a couple of weeks months for the next one thank you everyone for joining bye-bye thank you

2023-07-03 15:17

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