Unleashing Industry Potential With Digital Content in a Physical Space

There’s an escalating excitement around the metaverse, with the revenue opportunity predicted to reach $800bn by 2024. While it’s currently early days, much of the conceived concept today is centered around experiences in a purely synthetic space. In the manufacturing, energy, utilities, and nuclear sectors, this will provide little value, and digital content is most useful when blended with the physical world. One key innovation, mixed reality technology, is showing much more promise.

Transforming real-world experiences

It’s easy to see how the purely virtual concept of the metaverse has materialised. Over time, human-to-human interaction has moved from in-person to the telephone, then to video conferencing, and now to potentially synthetic business meetings. However, the very nature of industrial applications require employees to predominately deal with physical situations when troubleshooting or learning complex issues.

Mixed reality is the perfect blend of digital content in the existing physical space and can transform how information is viewed, processed, and utilised by frontline workers. Rather than abstracting from the real world, it’s all about making enhancements to the physical objects in front of us.

Taking the next step

With mixed reality the foundation, spatial computing is the next step. This is where the digital identity of the user, input from local sensors, situational data and the physical space all combine to provide the best digital experience. Take for example an industrial worker that needs access to the necessary content to complete a task effectively. With a unique account login, the system can identify the user and content can be provided as needed. This all may sound like an innovation from the future, but it’s very much possible today.

In this situation, workers can save time from not having to scour their tablet or device for the right information, and neither do they need to take themselves away from the real world by putting a VR headset on. Information is seamlessly available when interacting with physical objects. Other applications can extend to repair and maintenance by inexperienced workers to impactful hands-on training.

A new value proposition

While the consumer metaverse will be powered by a range of devices, it’s critical in the industrial space that hardware is hands-free to enable focus on physical fixes and improvements, with Kognitiv Spark’s RemoteSpark providing this capability. While the participation in an alternative digital reality will certainly appeal to some people, it just doesn’t work for industrial applications. Organisations will need to determine if the metaverse concept is truly supportive of their operations and the situations their employees find themselves in. Mixed reality and spatial computing can empower workers to complete tasks correctly the first time and every time thereafter.

Find out more about mixed reality technology for industrial applications.