AR is the gateway to Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 is such a broad term that the entry barrier is very high for small and mid-sized industrial companies. The Metaverse will help break that barrier down. Augmented Reality (AR) is the easy approach with a fast return on investment.
Augmented Reality
Industry 4.0
Metaverse
Industry 4.0 is like nirvana for automation geeks. It’s a state we’ll reach, once digitalization makes production and supply chain blend together to serve a higher purpose. Allowing the customer to order unique products, the robots to adjust themselves, and the factory to produce all goods locally – with no additional costs for producing one unit rather than a thousand.
That state requires an almost indefinite number of technological elements to play to the same tune, and data to be exchanged freely in the horizontal supply chains as well as vertically within the companies.
“With that in mind, it is almost self-explanatory that especially small and mid-sized manufacturing companies have a hard time figuring out where to invest in order to get going,” says Chief Product Officer in Virsabi, Jens Lauritsen.
Data where you need it
Boston Consulting Group has defined nine technologies that make up Industry 4.0. Augmented Reality is one of them, and for several good reasons.
“Interchange of data is an important key to success within Industry 4.0. Until we reach that technological nirvana where humans are no longer needed in the production process, people need access to those data. With AR and MR (Mixed Reality), you have your data right there with you on the production floor where you need it,” Lauritsen says.
Remote collaboration exploded
AR and MR give you immediate benefits, especially in regard to service and maintenance of equipment. With headset like HoloLens, the employee in the production environment can get production data or step-by-step guidance for maintenance tasks in a digital layer on top of the reality. Or share their field of vision with an expert anywhere in the world, who can talk to them and draw annotations in the virtual layer, all while the employee has his or her hands free to perform the task.
“This type of relatively simple remote collaboration with MR more or less exploded during COVID-19. Besides the savings on travel, many companies have had their eyes opened to other benefits like having more experts at a FAT (Factory Acceptance Test). In stead of sending two persons to the other side of the globe to do everything, they can now how five or six experts joining the same meeting and have every part controlled by the subject matter expert,” Jens Lauritsen says.
New ideas keep arising
In fact, it is only our imagination that sets the limits for what’s possible to present in AR and MR. And actually that too is one of the reasons why the barrier to start using AR and letting it be the gateway to Industry 4.0 is so low.
“Because remote collaboration in AR and MR is so easy, the headsets are put to work immediately. And usually we see that once people start using the technology, someone starts getting ideas as to who it can be used to simplify other tasks within the same company. That is also the reason why we almost always start our collaboration with new companies with a big ideation workshop, because they always bring out tons of good ideas,” he says.
