The Future of AR/VR and Industrial IoT for Business

As new wave digital technologies are spreading into our world, the attention is often on consumer applications and lifestyle benefits. This talk will explore the impact of VR/AR and IoT technologies on enterprises and the reasons behind their adoption.

Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality are now being regrouped under the term “XR,” meant to designate this ensemble of immersive technologies. In the consumer world, VR is mostly used in the gaming industry. It is also a major application for business, learning and development, as it is proven that people memorize much more effectively when immersed in real-life simulation exercises. The arrival of this technology is timely, as we face the challenge of potentially retraining millions of knowledge workers about to be displaced with the arrival of AI and robotic process automation. Furthermore, Industrial IoT applications are now leveraging XR technologies as part of maintenance industrial workflows, where digital twins and other IoT sensors predictively detect a potential issue with a production device, and local personnel can be remotely trained or guided to resolve the issue.

Both XR use cases are presently boosted by the arrival of the fifth-generation mobile technology (5G), recently launched in the U.S., South Korea and the UK. 5G will suppress the time delay which sometimes caused discomfort or nausea when using head mounted displays, and make the technology a lot more usable for both indoor and outdoor settings.

In this talk, Jean-Marc Frangos, recently in charge of innovation at BT, will introduce the potential of new immersive technologies for businesses. Francesco Furnari, Founder and CEO of VRtuoso, a company specializing in XR for learning and development, will articulate how they democratize the creation of content to allow for immersive technologies to become the norm in education and training. Lastly, Per Karlsson, Director of Media Research at Ericsson, will provide a variety of IIoT use case examples where XR can be used to streamline industrial workflows and reduce risk and cost. VR demonstrations will be provided after the talks.

Presenter(s)

Jean-Marc Frangos is a Silicon Valley corporate innovation thought leader and start-up NED/advisor. Jean-Marc set up and ran BT‘s Silicon Valley Outpost and transformed it from a $250M corporate venture fund to an Open Innovation and transformation function which played a major role in many new BT services, from TV to cloud services, but also IoT, and more recently 5G. He is part of the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Selection Committee, and also serves on the board of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley.

Francesco Furnari is Founder and CEO of VRtuoso, the world’s first 5G cloud Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality enterprise SaaS product. He also founded Clarity International, a Digital Design Integrator for multinational corporations, and he raised £7m from Softbank Ventures at the age of 21 for his first co-founded start-up. Francesco designed and ran more than 700 innovation programs for corporate clients in Europe, U.S. and Asia. A regular conference speaker, he’s also co-mentor and advisor at the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator and BemyGuru network. Francesco has won numerous awards including the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, Learning & Performance Institute Award, CMO of the Year Award, and the Enterprise Award – Start-up Entrepreneur of the Year.

Per Karlsson is the Director of Media Research at Ericsson, focusing on A/V coding, content analytics and how new XR experiences will be enabled by the rollout of 5G networks. He is also the Head of Ericsson Research in Silicon Valley focused on the areas of radio, AI, networking, media, cloud and security. The research is performed together with academia, customers, partners and universities. His team is currently actively engaged in collaborative projects focused on exploring new opportunities that the 5G networks will bring to the entertainment, manufacturing and automotive industry. Per has been in the industry since 1993, working in the intersection of research and products mainly at Ericsson, but also leading the networking research at the Swedish research institute, RISE Acreo.