AI, simulation, VR and the metaverse. What's the future?

'I’ve noticed within industry over the last decade there’s been massive change in how products are designed, engineered, and created.'

There has been a complete left field shift in relation to simulation and the understanding of the ins and outs of a product or service before anyone gets anywhere near a physical prototype.

This is extraordinarily exciting because efficiency can be driven through better understanding. This is created by putting a product, for example, in front of the customer and taking into consideration what they want, rather than what you can or would like to give them. The days of ‘build it and they will come’ seems somewhat anachronistic.

Simulation is now part of the design process.

It happens by taking all the attributes of a product or service and demonstrating these ideas to the people engineering them very early in the process, so trusted decisions are made and guesswork or miscommunication is avoided.

The process in an industry, such as automotive, means a car design is very quickly sculpted in CAD where traditionally this was created in clay. Some elements are still made in clay, of course but now there is a transition between physical and virtual which is informative and useful. Most designs are now undertaken in the virtual world and the benefit of this is you can remove a design from a 2D screen and into a 3D world.?The potential is significant and is and has been a game changer.

This process allows a designer to walk around and sit in the car and see it from every angle just as a customer would in a showroom. It also promotes meaningful and accurate communication as engineers and designers are all talking same language as they understand the products better. Therefore, further down the line there are fewer costly mistakes and the whole company is joined together in designing, understanding, and delivering a product. Mistakes and raw materials are costly so if both can be reduced or eliminated at certain times of the research and development that is excellent news and beneficial for the company and the planet.

If we look at the important development that will be on our roads soon, like autonomous cars, simulation is key to understanding the multiple scenarios that might occur over a vehicle’s lifetime within a couple of days. An example would be, an animal running across the road. What is the car’s ability to understand what it is and how it should react?

Simulation is the key accelerating change across multiple industries.

Automotive, aerospace even within the national networks, simulation is seminal to giving better customer product and enhancing efficiency in everything that’s done whether that’s environmental, financial around sustainability and safety.

Simulation in healthcare is a method of training medical professionals using artificial representations of real-world scenarios. The goal is to improve learning, engagement, and outcomes by providing simulated experiences followed by feedback and debriefing. This is important as we are now in a society that has an ageing population. Inevitably many have?long term, serious conditions including international virus spread, ( according to WHO almost 15 million people died as a result of Covid),resistance to antibiotics and drugs currently on the market. The health sector is now moving at a rate to understand different simulations of medical conditions, surgical procedures, rehabilitation, and mental health alongside complex on demand training for medical staff.

Mixed and virtual reality are now making possible a true understanding of the body.

Things we have struggled to comprehend are now visible. Surgeons can overlay the external parts of the body and see inside. Investigations into cancers and life-threatening illnesses have simulations that will contribute to preventative treatment pathways. It is estimated by 2040 that new technologies will have a profound effect in how we manage the burden of disease. We might expect a reduction of between 6-10%.

If you add AI (artificial intelligence) into the mix, you bring a whole new realm of medical diagnosis catching things early to not only prevent death but also maximise resources within the national health system. This could revolutionise everything we know about and how we experience medicine; nanotech might well save us.

e-health, combining the elements of simulation and AI with visualisation is boosting the e-health support to people at home. We are seeing the development of what might be termed hospitals without walls. This will keep growing. Inevitably we will be monitored 24/7 to prohibit and prevent illness long term. There will be more focus on prevention and prediction rather than a reactive medical approach. Even now there are many low tech tracking devices people think nothing of attaching to their bodies and connecting to their phones. Watch this space for the next iteration of nano robots.

Who will decide how invasive any of this tech might be for individuals?

However, as a caveat, we do live in a legacy world so there are two trains of thought with respect to how we move forward…one is to accelerate and rewrite what we know or start again without relying on past iterative processes and begin with a blank sheet. Both have profound challenges; one will be the cultural acceptance of change, the other might be ‘where to start?’ and others could be religious, philosophical sociological and even stubbornness. Who will decide how invasive any of this tech might be for individuals?

I believe, however, the real reason we don’t move forward is because people are the biggest stumbling block.

There is an almost inbuilt resistance to change and moving out of our comfort zone. It’s worth challenging that perspective and also combatting the fear of the unknown. New ways of communication and understanding are developing at a?pace we haven’t experienced before…in the past it’s been gradual, but change has been exponentially accelerated. Cultural change within industry, academia and society is one of the biggest barriers to progressing the abundance of opportunities within the immersive world.

As Head of Immersive at Falmouth University I feel it is paramount to undertake knowledge exchange and experiences to help further general understanding of the fascinating and profound opportunities of virtual, extended, augmented, and mixed and blended reality. If you want to know more then please do join us for our conference on the 23rd -25th February.