Collaborative Extended Reality

Collaboration in Virtual Reality is something we have been enabling at our subscribers enterprises for years. Yes, even years before the "Year of VR, 2016" when the public availability of the Oculus DK1 introduced the uninitiated to Virtual Reality. Since the turn of the century, IC.IDO subscribers had used Virtual Reality to address the lack of accessibility of preproduction prototype components and tooling. Conducting virtual reality reviews in CAVE and Powerwall projection based stereoscopic VR systems. VR systems were expensive, but less than the physical prototypes that it replaced or augmented in engineering programs and less expensive that waiting to find issues that could have been found in pilot assembly.

This year it's all xR or Extended Reality (which of course is a broad spectrum of technology including Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality). The new Head Mounted Display launched by Oculus then followed by HTC with their Vive and a veritable stampede of other HMDs, accelerated adoption of Virtual Reality for many industrial cases as the lack of accessible CAVE or Powerwall systems was addressed by more democratized hardware options.

Collaborative Virtual Workspaces, which were technically challenging to host pre 2016, were now more accessible. It is not common to hear users share anecdotes of collaborative engineering reviews between engineering centers on opposite sides of the world. Nine time zones is the furthest I have heard reported, personally my record is five time zones joining teammates transatlantic, transcontinental, and trans-equatorial.

But there are still barriers to wider adoption of Extended Reality. Hardware for HMD based VR is a much lower threshold than the clusters and CAVE configurations of the past. But challenges still remain. One challenge is how to include stakeholders with asymmetrical computing capabilities? What if we needed to include participants who could not join the synchronous collaboration due to limited access to computing hardware or advance XR hardware? One way we have filled that gap is by enabling users to create Persistent Experience exports from the IC.IDO Immersive Experiences, that they usually consume on powerful PCs and HMDs, as WebVR three degree of freedom viewpoints and animated sequences.

Meredith and I will be running our next engineering review as a collaborative session in IC.IDO Build & Maintain during our upcoming ESI Live Event. But all our preparations will be completed asynchronously and remote, leveraging the power of IC.IDO Persistent Experience to provide feedback and input into a common Collaborative Virtual Workspace session. If you like, you could try it yourself: here is a link to a persistent experience we previously used to show VR for a Wheeled Loader example.

Join Meredith and I on November 4th, 2021 at ESI Live. https://www.esi-group.com/esi-live