Thanks to virtual reality, a vocational training student can face a class of occupational risks without any danger. And learn in 10 hours what you would have previously taken in 40. With augmented reality, we can visualize in front of our eyes the car we want to buy thanks to a mobile phone or tablet and decide if we like it or not. Mixed reality allows an operator to locate the parts of an engine that must be changed without having to know it beforehand.
These experiential technologies have reached the company and the industry with the intention of complementing them. Among all, virtual reality is, perhaps, the one that is most popular in video games.
Augmented reality adds objects to pure and simple reality, the one we have before our eyes. Example that will be familiar to us: the game Pokémon Go, where Pokémon appear in the real world on the mobile screen. Mixed reality, for its part, allows us to create new spaces in which real and virtual people and objects interact.
This would be the case of the big screen that unfolds before Tom Cruise's eyes in Minority Report, a computerized three-dimensional space with elements that he moves with his hands, but without ceasing to see the real world.
Innovae is responsible for offering companies this type of extended reality solutions, the name that brings together the previous three. Barcelona Free Trade Zone. “These transversal facilitating technologies, as part of the digitalization that they are, contribute to improving the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector because they do things faster and in safer environments,” says Xavier Riba, co-founder and territorial director of Innovae.
For example, this company has designed training for Acciona through which a wind turbine operator only has to put on the mixed reality glasses and when he performs maintenance on the electrical part, the glasses guide him in an agile, easy and documented way. with real photographs of each section of the wind turbine. “In addition, your safety is reinforced, since the glasses can warn you if electricity is passing through a certain cable at that moment, the glasses are your guide at all times,” explains Riba.
At SEAT, frontline workers, when new engines arrive, have instructions placed on top of each part with mixed reality so that they learn how it works. “With this they learn faster, their adaptation period is in record time, and this translates into a profit for that industry.”
Innovae offers this to the client with its own platform that allows each one to generate their own procedures, “as if it were an instruction book, but digital, exhaustively documented and divided into parts for easy understanding and learning.”
“It is about companies understanding that their most critical processes can be ensured and safeguarded in the company itself, because many times they have all this documentation on paper and sometimes it is lost.” From digitizing the information, it is then moved to a tablet and when the operators/employees have become familiar with this system, the jump is made to the mixed reality glasses. “New glasses come out every month, they are constantly evolving. "We do not manufacture glasses, but we can provide them to the client when we provide them with our software."
This company has 18 years of experience and, at that time, augmented reality was still incipient and the market was not mature: “At that time, the uses of this technology were not yet understood, it was seen as a game. But in the last 10 years its usefulness has been increasingly seen in the industrial environment,” explains Riba. “Adopting these softwares and making operators familiar with them is one more stage of digitalization; industries will reach mixed reality sooner or later.”
If there is a sector that is already benefiting from this technique, it is, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, that of education, “because students are very quickly adopting these devices, which allow them to learn four times faster than with the method.” traditional".
Imagine being able to practice while learning, for example, how to care for the elderly, how to perform first aid or how to analyze chemical products, and in this case, also, without the risk of suffering an accident. “In occupational risk training, imagine being able to take a hose and see what it would be like to put out a fire in real time; In electronics classes, being able to touch a virtual button and a light turns on. Or also learn to face job interviews with a simulation.”
The trend in extended reality devices is towards increasingly lighter glasses and perhaps without controls, that is, with more cameras and all the operations incorporated. Instead of these controls, “we could wear wearables such as gloves, vests... connected to the glasses that transmit greater sensitivity in the experience. We would see this in about five or seven years.” So, beyond the business environment, the use of this technology would extend to our daily lives and it is possible that we could buy furniture, clothes or whatever is online, seeing the products in real size in the living room or in front of the office. mirror.
