Elly Yates-Roberts |
Mixed reality solutions, enabled by Microsoft HoloLens 2, are changing the way in which many industries work. With use cases ranging from training to remote repair, the capabilities offered by mixed reality can enable businesses to completely transform their operations.
Kognitiv Spark, creator of augmented reality remote support tool RemoteSpark, is aiming to bring the benefits of mixed reality to business. Duncan McSporran, Kognitiv Spark’s co-founder and vice president of aerospace and defence, says that one of the most powerful benefits is better decision-making.
“By empowering the end user in the workforce with the information and knowledge that they need, mixed reality can help them to make decisions more effectively, and in the full knowledge that it’s the correct decision,” he says. “The technology really is in a class of its own when it comes to enabling that flow of information, and it allows organisations to speed up the tempo of their operations significantly.”
McSporran also highlights the value of a solution that is easy for workers to use and understand.
“I think that the ease of using mixed reality would surprise a lot of people,” he says. “That’s partly because our solution is designed to be easy-to-use right from the word go, but also because we ensure that mixed reality aligns with the organisation’s operational imperatives. We take a very collaborative approach when building a partnership, and we make sure that mixed reality aligns with the aims of an organisation.”
The potential uses of mixed reality can have a profound impact in the industrial environment, but there are also examples of the technology being successfully utilised in a range of different contexts.
“One of the things that continues to amaze me is the variety and widespread nature of the use cases mixed reality enables,” says McSporran. “We’ve worked with the Canadian Armed Forces, who started using our systems for mixed reality to help repair a piece of equipment, with a 3D hologram showing them how to complete the repair in steps. However, the Navy has also now started to use mixed reality to train medics following a pilot process. That has been an eye-opening example of just how the technology can have a real impact on people.”
In the future, the huge increases in the amount of data that organisations have available to them could allow mixed reality to have an even greater impact.
“What we’re looking towards is the use of the massive amounts of data we now have access to in a mixed reality environment,” says McSporran. “The visualisation of that data through mixed reality technology can reduce the cognitive burden on end users, helping them to understand complex information more easily. Mixed reality is going to be enabled by the convergence with big data, and it’s going to change the way people absorb and learn from the information we have at our fingertips.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.