Shared AR With Thingworx

Lately, I have been playing with PTC's Thingworx, an authoring platform for Internet of Things (IOT) apps, because it has some serious Augmented Reality capability now (https://www.thingworx.com/). Starting from zero, I got through their "pump" tutorial for the Hololens in a just few hours, so I could see at machine part floating in front of me. I photoshopped it into this picture to give you the idea.

Later, I sat down with PTC's Marty Markenson (in the background) and he guided me step by step through the process of creating a very simple AR experience that any number of people can share. When he was done, I could set up any number of Hololens or iOS users all seeing the same blue pump floating in the air. Any one of them could turn the pump "on" (visible) or "off" (invisible). Simple, but the implications are profound; nearly the same logic could be used to switch between different versions of something. The picture shows two of us messing with the pump.

There were many steps, and it'll be a while before I could do this on my own, but the basic idea is simple. Every instance of the program is sharing an object that lives on a PTC server. The object is nothing more than a boolean variable. When it's "1" the programs show the pump. When it's "0", they don't. Any of them can toggle the state of the variable.

Every second Saturday of the month BostonVR (https://bostonvr.org) has an informal "Hack Day" where we meet at the Brookline Interactive Group (https://brooklineinteractive.org/) to just hang out and make VR and AR all day. Our gigantic thanks to Marty for joining us on August 12th, and giving a class on how Thingworx works.