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Restructuring the Manufacturing Segment by Encompassing AR and VR

Leave a Comment / Product Management, Tech tips / By

Mass manufacturing is one area that comprises highly automated operations, eliminating the manual labour from all the phases of a process. Building the parts of a finished product and putting them together by modernizing the supply chain helps the businesses reach the pinnacle of AR and VR development.

Yet, many manufacturing businesses lack in thoroughly preparing themselves to implement and integrate their full potential in their processes. The manufacturing sector is an area where each step of any process matters. Even the slightest of the errors in an operation can lead to a massive setback for the businesses. However, the remarkable abilities of augmented reality app development can simulate anything and everything valuable for industries.

Also Read: Virtual reality, experiencing a parallel world altogether

Essential Areas Where AR and VR are Transforming the Manufacturing Sector

AR and VR hold the managers accountable for simulating the production process by assembling the line configurations and figuring out possible threatening situations. These technologies can also be used to embed employees in a workstation to capture their movements and evaluate proficiencies. Here are some key areas where AR and VR can transform the manufacturing processes:

Addressing Labor Shortage

AR/VR technology can bring employees together in a simulated holographic environment and teach them the same level of professionalism. AR and VR can transform how employees consume information with internal training programs to attract and develop the talent manufacturers need. By overlaying digital content and analytics onto the real world, they can also provide procedural guidance, set-ups, instructions, and workflows. They can also eliminate the need to send employees on the site by creating fully immersive simulated environment experiences and virtually visit a remote plant, gas platforms, even if they are under construction.

Training for Emergencies

Operators and control engineers must always prepare themselves and employees for any type of emergencies. It includes chemical reactions, leaks, explosion, shutdown/restarts, equipment upgrades, or sudden product changeovers. AR and VR can prepare them for such emergencies in the manufacturing industry, where one needs quick action to reduce risks. It can bring immense value to all processes by providing virtual environments for practising. Features like immersive digital twins can help them practice emergency response situations and learn the nature of different responses on various operations. Also, workers can practice even if the facility is under construction or if they are in any remote location.

AR and VR can enhance and augment existing product and service designs to enable entirely new techniques. Such processes that involve rapid prototyping and collaboration can quicken and enrich the pace of a creative process. This also reduces the time taken for building physical prototypes and then translating them. It can also eliminate the processes dramatically by bringing ideas to life and products to market quicker than before. With VR, product designers can interact with a holographic model of the product in various ways. They can virtually touch parts, simulate ways of using it, create best and worst-case scenarios, and identify potential design flaws.

Also Read: Ready, Player One: How MSI Defined the Gaming Industry

Assembly and Quality Maintenance

Manufacturing companies often use paper manuals for assembly instructions for building tools while designing a product. These assembly instructions are bound to create errors while putting together the intricate designs and can also increase the cost of reassembling it. AR and VR can be of great assistance to the employees in assembling the product with the utmost accuracy with head-mounted AR headsets or tablets. It can also change the entire dynamics of the development process that takes several hours on figuring out the exact location of a part. AR and VR can also reduce the time a product takes to reach the store shelves and make the inspection procedure more efficient and productive.

Sales and Marketing

With the help of AR and VR, we get to see small and large products, how they will fit in a customer’s space, and their external & internal working. Marketing is the most integral part of designing VR and AR solutions that can make or break the experience. Users can perform better in an AR/VR simulated environment as gamification increases their memorability. However, creating a well-designed experience out of gamification involves both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and reward schedules for effective user engagement.

Also Read: WHY DIGITAL MARKETING IS ESSENTIAL IN 2020?

Concluding Words

AR and VR technology will be doubling in pixels for better image rendering, widening its field of view, and developing better virtual sound amplification. For manufacturers already in this realm, these improvements will help drive efficiencies, increase productivity, and save both lives and money. For others, not yet engaging with VR technology, the good news is that 9series is an emerging AR/VR app development company providing the very best versions of immersive experiences. AR and VR are full of potential and enthusiasm that can undoubtedly lead to enhancement in safety, design functions, and bringing humans and machines closer.

Also Read: Oren Harnevo : The Founder of Eyeview, a Digital Marketing Company

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality, experiencing a parallel world altogether

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We, especially as kids dreamt of exploring so many strange places. The scene from those video games, space movies and especially the animated world in kid’s television shows fascinated us. Back then, we did know very little about animation and boons of technology. But, eventually we grew up and so did science. Have you ever thought, if a Virtual Reality world can be formed in a desktop screen then why not around us? Because every video games, animated movies are based on the manipulation of visual and auditory sensors.

This gave rise to the term ‘Virtual Reality’ where one can be virtually present in a different world and interact. The work on the acreage of virtual reality started a long time ago. The concept of virtual or artificial reality was introduced in the early 1900s. But, everything was proposed in the form of theory or an artistic form. It was all a perspective back then. The real man who is behind converting this literature to true visual illustrations is Jaron Lanier. He is a world-famous computer scientist along with being a man who admires art in the form of music.

What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual Reality can be solely described as visual illustrations along with the auditory system. The main feature of virtual reality is audio and video feedback systems. Today, it can be best described using virtual reality headsets along with a head-mounted display. Once you put it on, it gives an experience of a real-world with 3-D animations where you can walk and interact with other creatures. A virtual reality environment can also be made using large screens. It is often shown in movies that an entire room is converted to a different environment where the illustrations are reflected on those screens.

Virtual Reality has hugely developed in all these years. It has mainly contributed to the gaming industry, education and also in military training. Before Lanier stepped into this domain of technology, some theory and primitive research works were carried out by Morton Heilig (1950), Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull (1968) and David Em (1977).

Researches on how to navigate the virtual world were carried out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1980s. It was in 1985 that Lanier founded a company for virtual reality products and pioneered it.

Jaron Lanier

Born into a Jewish family in 1960, Lanier grew up in New Mexico. He lost his mother in a car accident when he was nine. Lanier didn’t belong to a privileged family and spent his early childhood living in tents. He was a highly brilliant student and hence got enrolled in New Mexico State University at the age of thirteen. Eventually, he started doing a project funded by the National Science Foundation and it introduced him to computer programming.

In 1983, Lanier started working for Atari (an American video game developing company) and later focused more on learning virtual programming language.
In 1985, Lanier finally founded his own company, VPL Research devoted to virtual reality. But, the business failed terribly after a couple of years and he was bankrupted. The company was finally acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

Lanier played his role as chief scientist of Advanced Networks and Services (a non-profit organization), a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Lanier, along with carrying out his research, nurtured his artistic part as well. He is a visiting artist at New York University.

Virtual Reality in the 21st century

A lot of development took place after Lanier introduced to the world of virtual reality. Many video game companies like Sega introduced VR headsets for their game series. In 2007, Google added a new feature, Street View in their maps which gave a panoramic visual effect. In 2010, the prototype of Oculus Rift was created which came with a new feature of rotational tracking. It was the first of its kind in the market which was later acquired by Facebook for $3 billion.

In 2013, Valve Corporation introduced new VR products in the market that provided a smear-free and lag-free display. In the next year, Sony launched VR headsets for Play Station 4. Within the next couple of years, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Google, Sony etc grabbed the VR market. Research is still ongoing on how to make a better user interface, more viable, 360-degree interactive photography, better motion controllers etc.

Facebook to Soon Roll Out a New Voice Assistant for its AR/VR Products Lineup

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First Siri and then Alexa, followed by a few other voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby, have made their own space among people. Now in the same course, Facebook is also about to launch its own AI-based digital voice assistant. The company, too, has confirmed the news that it will be soon introducing a new voice assistant for its AR and VR lineup.

facebook voice assistant
Image Sourec: washingtonpost.com

“We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products.” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

According to a former Facebook employee, the company has been working on the voice assistant for its augmented reality and virtual reality division for a year now. The team of developers, for this new product, is led by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant, and the team is based out of Redmond, Washington.

It is expected that the voice assistant is especially being built for the AR, VR products including the Oculus headsets as well as the company’s Portal video chat device.

This is not the first time that the company is trying its hands in the field of voice assistant production. But, in 2015, Facebook had launched a voice assistant for its messenger named as ‘M’. The product could not sustain for long as despite offering the users smart suggestions, it required human help to run.

Even though the company has been working on its voice assistant for a year, it is still way behind the digital voice assistants by the other tech giants. But according to the company, its voice assistant will focus more on the products that can handle hands-free interactions. This way the genre of Facebook’s voice assistants may not be similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

Magic Leap Opens Up New Options for People to Buy its AR Headsets, Including From Selected AT&T Stores

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Many of you might have heard of augmented reality headset Magic Leap One that the company Magic Leap launched last year. The company has partnered with AT&T and has announced that the company is going to exclusively sell this mixed reality headset in some of the flagship AT&T stores in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago starting from April 1st.

magic leap
Image Sourec: magicleap.com

Though many early buyers have already got their hands on the Magic Leap One Creator Edition AR headset a few months ago, the company has opened up new options for its buyers to get access to the same in the coming month. In fact, the company has also teamed up with the HBO to deliver the Game of Thrones fans a next level experience with this AR headset, i.e., the company will demo the GOT White Walkers through the MAgic Leap One at the AT&T stores. As the GOT final season is also about to premiere in April, teaming up with HBO is a clever marketing move that the company has opted for.

The availability of the Magic One headset won’t be right away. It will be available at the Boston store on Boylston Street on April 1st, at the AT&T store of the Chicago location on Michigan Avenue from 3rd April and from the 5th April, the headset will be made available at the AT&T store of the San Francisco location at 1 Powell Street. People will also be able to buy the headset online from the AT&T website from the 5th of April.

The Magic Leap One is a $2,295 AR headset, which is on an expensive side. But if you are also interested in buying the same without paying such a big amount at once, the company is also offering people to buy the headset on affordable monthly instalments.

Though there are already many other VR headsets available in the market which are exceptionally great at user experience, including Oculus and Valve, Magic Leap is also trying to hit the market with a new experience. But still, it has not made much of the efforts as there is not many great gaming contents on Magic Leap. So there are lesser reasons people would invest such a huge amount on Magic Leap One except to explore the new technology.

Nintendo Announces a Labo Cardboard VR Kit for the Switch

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It was in 2014 when Google demonstrate a cardboard virtual reality. Last year in April, Nintendo introduced a gaming and construction toy platform, including kits with cardboard cut-outs and other materials, that are used to create different toy-con DIY projects.

Nintendo Labo VRKit
Image Source: uploadvr.com

Now, Nintendo Labo has stepped a bit forward and has announced the latest Labo VR Kit for the Switch. The new Labo VR Kit transforms the Nintendo Switch into a VR Kit and puts the system a few inches from your face. The kit is available in various options, and when assembled.

The cost of the main Labo VR Kit is $79.99 and offers six different toy-con designs. The six toy-con includes a pair of VR goggles, a blaster, a camera, an elephant, a bird and a wind pedal. The kit also comprises a screen holder and a safety cap. The Labo VR Kit also incorporates the Labo software, step-by-step instructions, and the “garage” mode for building your own Labo creations.

The users who already own a Labo VR Kit can use the Toy-Con Garage with the Nintendo Labo Kit and experiment with their Labo Kit.

Although the $79.99 is a complete kit, the company is also offering cheaper kits with lesser toy-con sets. You can also buy a $39.99 starter kit that includes the goggles and blaster. The other kits for the same price are the pairs of the elephant and the camera, and the wind pedal and the bird. You can also purchase additional project kits as well. Even you can get the elephant for $20, later.

Nintendo Labo works towards teaching engineering and basic programming to its users, so the Labo Kits for VR are just to promote creativity. These are the fun games that are nowhere close to the high definition games. The Labo VR games can be played without mounting the Switch to your face or even without using the Nintendo Switch.

The kit is a way to “introduce virtual reality in a way that’s fun and approachable for both kids and kids at heart,” said Doug Bowser, the incoming President of Nintendo America.

The new Labo VR Kit is considered as the unique first Virtual Reality experience. The kit will be available in the market from 12 April this year.

Microsoft Unveils its New $3,500 Second-gen Holographic Headset HoloLens 2 at MWC 2019

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Starting on Sunday, a few tech giants have already showcased their upcoming technologies, in the Mobile World Congress ( MWC) 2019 happening in Barcelona, Spain, including LG that introduced its forthcoming foldable phone in the same event.

HOLOLENS-2
Image Source: wired.com

On the same league, Microsoft also revealed its new second generation mixed reality headset, HoloLens 2, the successor to 2016’s groundbreaking holographic headset. The device is an AI-backed pair of goggles, integrated with the company’s Azure cloud services. The new HoloLens 2 is more efficient, more advanced and more improved version of its predecessor.

The HploLens 2 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Compute Platform and also has its own custom-built processing unit. The device comes with an iris authentication technology, such that it is ready to use as soon as the user puts it on. It offers a double field view, approximating 2,000 pixels per eye, maintaining the holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight. The headset projects across a 100-degree swath, which is almost double as of its predecessor, projecting to a wider viewing area. It is built with the microelectromechanical system (MEMS) display technology, providing the 2K display for each eye.

The device boasts a 5-channel microphone array, and spatial built-in hardware is employed to the device, which controls the audio I/O of the device. The device is embedded with an advanced ToF sensor, through which the headset allows the users to interact with a hologram with their hands. Now the user does not need to use the virtual reality icons, rather they can simply move their hands to control the HoloLens. It also includes a 12-megapixel RGB camera, to facilitate video conferencing.

The device uses the USB-C for charging and includes a pretty generic 2×2 802.11ac wireless radio. It also offers Remote Rendering which processes the holograms of up to 100 million polygons, through the Azure-powered service, serving as the external GPU for the HoloLens 2.

The new HoloLens 2 is more immersive and more comfortable than its predecessor. The cost of the headset is set to be $3,500 (around Rs. 2,49,000), and currently, is only available on the Microsoft e-shop, for the citizens of United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia, and New Zealand. According to Kipman, Microsoft’s technical fellow for AI and mixed reality, the device is not for the gamers or the knowledge workers but is specially designed for the enterprise customers, workers who fix gear shifts and work on oil rigs, and the military personnel.