Augmented and virtual realities as digital realities will allow: working at a distance; physically handicapped people having professions never thought of before; c-level management managing sites around the world from the office; and saving paper and trees. People will be able to work as in Real Time Multiplayer games. This chapter also refers the importance of IoT to support these technologies based on optical fiber or 5G; the possibility to be used from blue collars with smartphones up to c-level with powerful hardware. The author exposes differences between augmented and virtual realities in professional context, the possibility to use mixed reality with both technologies, and advantages and problems. Examples are given from manufacturing and maintenance industries and for retail business; to make mock-ups and test, to practice activities, to operate and feel real assets and to help on the sale of products.
TopIntroduction
Cerion Armour-Brown, Automation Expert, Altran Netherlands, exposes on Altran website1 about future vision of this company:
As the trend of our workforce continues to move from physical to mental labor, high-performance immersive VR will enable remote real-time collaborative development in a large number of domains. This new paradigm for work will provide the high-resolution, low-latency needed for large groups, and easy-to-use private communications for one-to-one interactions, all in endlessly customizable virtual environments. Yes, even a virtual ping-pong table game to keep us moving! Immersive VR will hugely reduce the need for international economic migration and national commuter travel. It will also have improved benefits for inclusivity and accessibility for those with disabilities. RSI2will be a thing of the past with speech- and gesture-recognition becoming the primary man-machine-interface modes. Designing will be done using new ‘higher-order’ digital visual representations, allowing us to design, develop and maintain at orders of magnitude faster than we currently do with our written-language based models. Multi-dimensional views of the (product/software, etc.) architectures will show the behavior and interactions of systems/modules/components from different aspects. Plugging into the Digital-Twin of the product augmented by data-analytics will show the real-time data-flows, highlighting performance bottlenecks and errors needing attention – all from the comfort of your own home or adaptable workplace.
This shows how deep technological companies have already the vision about the new possibilities on the labor market, to use the brainpower using digital realities independently of physical capabilities. A complete breakthrough in the humankind, used to use muscle power to subsist and in the last decades at office positions, to be seated in a desk with a computer in front (Figure 1).
Will be explored this change on paradigm and how will affect the way a job will be faced or seen.
TopDigital Realities
Virtual reality is a digital technology that allows users to feel in a different sensorial environment from real environment. Mainly regarding vision, sounds and in some cases by touch having electronic gloves (to taste and to smell are things not too easy to digitalize, nevertheless some experiences have been done). Is about living sensations in a virtual scenario that was made from scratch or copying the real world, but always digitally made with no interaction with real world.
Those feelings can come with more or less with no interference from exterior world; it’s possible for example make realistic scenarios to be seen in a single computer screen or several to simulate for example an airplane or car cockpit (Figure 2) to have the feeling to drive one of this kind of vehicles from the interior. In addition, in a large screen, it is possible to “see” a digital car at real scale to understand better its design before real mock-ups or prototype are made (Figure 3).