Interviews

How TeamViewer is bringing digitalisation to the shop floor by bridging the physical and digital worlds

The emergence of the Industrial Metaverse opens a new vista of opportunities that is empowering organizations across numerous industries to accelerate their digital transformation journey. Moreover, Industrial Metaverse sits at the junction of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), playing a critical role in reshaping traditional business models, revolutionizing operations, and go-to-market strategies. In an exclusive interaction with Rupesh Lunkad, Managing Director – India, TeamViewer, he talks about the implications of emerging technologies to drive technological innovations at a larger scale, and how TeamViewer is reinventing businesses and streamlining the entire value chain by connecting workers in the Industrial Metaverse.

 

  1. Impact of Industrial Metaverse in converging physical connectivity and immersion

Response: Today, we are living in a hyperconnected world, and advanced technologies are at the forefront of driving digital transformation. As the technology landscape continues to evolve, the Metaverse will be creating a significant impact across industries. In fact, according to a report by Strategic Market Research, the Metaverse industry is poised to surpass $678.80 billion in value by 2030. Discussions about applications of the ‘Metaverse’ mostly focus on the ‘Consumer Metaverse’. It is a form of virtual reality with digital representations of people and objects. You can meet as avatars, hold meetings, or go shopping – completely detached from the offline world. The Industrial Metaverse, however, is still anchored in the real world and digitalizes information and data. These are displayed to industry workers using augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) smart glasses in the immediate field of view via small screens placed directly in front of the eye. With AR and MR solutions, you can show the worker’s workflows and holograms as if they were part of reality without blocking their field of view. The software uses real-time data from back-end systems and displays immersive training workflows or step-by-step instructions. This results in almost boundless application areas, including but not limited to logistics, assembly, service, training, or maintenance. The technology can thus be used along the entire industrial value chain.

Over the years, through technology innovations, TeamViewer has demonstrated its tech capabilities and today, it sees itself as a key enabler of the Industrial Metaverse, that will bring forth robust solutions for commercial and professional use. To cite an example – TeamViewer’s usage in training and onboarding scenarios in the automotive industry. Using TeamViewer Frontline, new employees learn how to inspect, maintain, and repair cars through mixed reality glasses like the Microsoft HoloLens, and leveraging TeamViewer’s spatial capabilities, the trainees can see virtual instructions and markers on top of the real car. This creates a much more immersive and intuitive learning experience, ultimately resulting in better knowledge transfer.

 

  1. Role of a Digital Twin technology in the Industrial Metaverse

Response: The Industrial Metaverse can be enhanced by harnessing and understanding the power of Digital Twin technology. It can be used to further examine virtual or digital counterparts of physical assets and help in ascertaining and forecasting the recent and future states of said assets.

The confluence between Digital Twin and Industrial Metaverse is enabling businesses to drive operations in new, innovative, and strategic ways. Such as –

  • Demonstrate aspects of reality in real-time accurately that are not visible to everyone in the Industrial Metaverse
  • Help in imitating and predicting the actions of a real-world object to build strategic products while avoiding costly mistakes
  • Integrate Digital Twins and Industrial Metaverse technologies to improve prediction, monitoring, tracking, allocation, resource management, optimization, and quality control

Additionally, amalgamating and implementing emerging technologies like Blockchain, Machine Learning (ML), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR) can produce even more precise and accurate forecasts of a unified virtual and human world. Nevertheless, manufacturing will continue to produce physical goods. Despite use cases like the digital twin, that can be 100 % transferred to the virtual world, a large part of the Industrial Metaverse will always be anchored in the real world. For the broad adoption on the shopfloor, AR and MR are therefore more probable and far more scalable technologies for the digitalization of manufacturing processes.

 

  1. Impact of Operational Technology & Augmented Reality in boosting companies to digitize their value chain

Response: To bring the next wave of growth, the advancement in the technology landscape is imperative to create innovative products and solutions. Moreover, AR and Operational Technology (OT) are assisting in avoiding the social isolation of employees at work while also helping to save money and time. For example, AR is widely used in logistics, as it helps in minimizing supply chain inefficiencies, enabling workers to work hands-free, and digitalizing processes for higher picking efficiency and less errors.

On the other hand, TeamViewer’s enterprise connectivity solutions enable its customers to manage remote connectivity between all sorts of devices, which are not just restricted to IT equipment such as computers, servers, and mobile phones. It is also extended to industrial equipment like production machines, robots, vehicles, etc. to allow easy and secure remote management of a company’s devices in an IT and OT infrastructure with endless use cases in terms of maintenance, troubleshooting, and support.  On the other hand, we also provide solutions to digitalize work processes along the entire value chain – across logistics, manufacturing, field service, and quality assurance.

 

 

  1. Role of AI, AR, and MR in transforming the customer experience

Response: Emerging technologies like AI, AR, and MR are playing an integral role in transforming the way businesses have now been conducting operations across numerous industries. In the increasingly digitalized world of today, companies have been exploring numerous working models to suit their organizational needs. Moreover, the pandemic and the remote working models have pushed companies to embrace using remote experts to create truly seamless end-to-end customer experiences and the facilitation of highly personalized offerings enriched by AR annotations.

TeamViewer is using such technologies effectively to create deeper connections with their customer and achieve longer-term customer loyalty by further driving the demand for this market by integrating AI, AR, and MR solutions.

  • TeamViewer Frontline: TeamViewer Frontline is a fully integrated augmented reality solution. The solution improves manual work processes across industries based on the latest wearable computing technologies. Moreover, the platform also enables employees wearing MR smart glasses such as the Microsoft HoloLens to execute tasks in a more intuitive, interactive way by providing them with digital information, three-dimensional elements, and multimedia content in an AR/MR environment
  • AiStudio: It is a fully integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) add-on to TeamViewer’s leading enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) platform Frontline. AiStudio consists of a self-learning algorithm to train AI models for image and object recognition. Following TeamViewer’s, no-code approach for the Frontline platform, the use of AiStudio does not require any programming skills. This enables all customers to easily add AI capabilities to their day-to-day operations and improve their processes through the automated verification

 

  1. TeamViewer’s focus on the ‘Make in India’ vision through government tie-ups to further accelerate its operations in the Indian market and propel the growth of industry 4. O

Response: India is an important market for TeamViewer and has been playing an imperative role in accelerating the digital transformation journey of the country. TeamViewer is aligned with the Government of India’s vision and now, in India, the company is closer to its customers than before.  We are focusing on two domains to further accelerate our growth in the Indian market. On the one hand, we are building partnerships with large enterprises and conglomerates to drive their technological journey. On the other hand, we focus on the auto, manufacturing, and government sector to increase business efficiency in these verticals.

 

 

Leave a Response