How we are taking VR from your living room to controlling industries

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality has been an interesting technology for many years without really taking off. But in the last year or two, the technology has got some air under its wings. It’s always hard to predict the future, but speaking as a software developer working with VR solutions, I think the trend will stick this time.

VR hardware has become small, cheap, and good enough to really make it accessible. You no longer need a powerful gaming PC and many sensors connected with long cables to get a good VR experience. You can just put on your ski-goggles-like headset, grab your hand controllers, and you are good to go.

The graphics processors on the standalone headsets today can drive a high-resolution display at a high frame rate, reducing the risk of motion sickness. Controllers have gotten more accurate. The risk of bumping into chairs, tables, and walls while inside the virtual world is minimized with cameras tracking the surroundings and putting up virtual walls when you are nearing the physical wall.

It has taken a while for app developers to grasp what you can do with the technology. VR demands a whole new way of thinking when it comes to the user interface. A flat surface with text, buttons, and input fields can still be helpful. Still, VR can harness a more natural way of interacting: pushing, pulling, lifting, twisting, and grabbing objects gives you endless possibilities to interact with the user. App developers are still struggling to find intuitive interactions since we are used to a flat 2D surface. It gets even more complex when even controllers and their buttons are replaced with more accurate hand tracking. But now and then, an app pops up, like Google’s Tilt Brush, that shows how a good VR UI can improve user experience.

Both of these improvements in hardware and software will drive the VR market for consumers. A market that now has the technical conditions met to create an opportunity to grow a lot. But the corporate world has other conditions that need to be met before they will embrace the virtual world.

How VR is going corporate
Companies want to manage their VR headset like they do with any other mobile devices. They want a company-specific app store. Be able to wipe devices if they are lost. They want easy integration with their existing cloud services. If the consumer business is in its early stages, then it is even more so for the enterprise business. Both Oculus and HTC have taken some steps on the way, but the road is long before VR becomes a natural part of companies’ device fleets.

So far, enterprises have focused on training and visualization when it comes to VR. And if you ever tried VR yourself, you may agree that this is where VR shines. Visualizing CAD models or scans of an environment can give you a sense of depth and size that no 2D screen can provide you. Significantly when you can scale and rotate your objects of interest with just the twist of your hand or take a walk in the environment.

At Knightec, we have developed a VR collaboration tool for a customer. They needed to connect their customers, spread all over the world, with their experts. Instead of flying their experts to the customer site, they let the customer use off-the-shelf tools to do a 3D scan of their product. The customer can then step into a virtual world, together with experts from the other side of the world, to help the customer analyze the wear and set an optimal maintenance schedule.

The next step in VR development
For the future, I think we will see VR taking a more active part than pure visualization. Training is a step in that direction where the user no longer is an observer but instead manipulates its virtual environment. Some companies have moved their certification and training into the VR environment.

The next step is controlling the natural world from the VR world. Or, in that case, it’s more often an augmented world. We can see some examples today of using VR goggles to control drones and cranes. The more we equip machines with machine vision technologies, the more we want to be able to step into and see the world of the devices. The more machine vision is about depth, scale, and distances, the more VR is needed to visualize that for us.

Think of a harvest drone, thinning trees, that runs into an issue in the middle of a forest. A technician needs to take over to maneuver out of the situation in a safe way. They are having a good VR experience and low latency network (e.g., 5G). These technologies are crucial to enable the technician to solve the situation instead of driving hundreds of kilometers to do a 5-minute job.

VR/AR is an exciting technology that I think will be integrated into any solutions like this in the future rather than as a standalone application. As an engineer, I am excited to have the privilege to work with such technologies daily.

Get in touch with us if you are interested in exploring VR solutions for your organization.

Author
Magnus Strödin has a Master of Science in communication systems and works as a senior consultant at Knightec. Magnus has worked 15 years with software development of embedded systems, Internet communication software, machine vision, and VR.