Augmented & Virtual Reality: Industrial Perspectives

The expression Industry 4.0 conveys a vision of the future in which digital technologies help industrial and manufacturing companies to increase their competitiveness and efficiency through interconnection and cooperation between their own resources (plant, people, information), both within the factory and all along the value chain. Digital technologies are at the heart of Industry 4.0: the same technologies that have brought disruptive change to the tertiary sector over the past decade.
Innovative digital technologies, the so-called Smart Technologies, can be grouped into two main categories: the first, more closely related to Information Technology (IT), includes the Industrial Internet (of Things), Industrial Analytics and Cloud Manufacturing; the second, more heterogeneous and closer to the Operational Technologies (OT) stratum, includes technologies such as Advanced Automation, Advanced Human Machine Interface and Additive Manufacturing.
The focus of this Report is to take a closer look at one of the six technical categories identified: Advanced Human Machine Interface, which refers to recent developments in the field of wearable devices and new human/machine interfaces for acquiring and/or conveying information by vocal, visual or tactile means (for example with touch displays, 3D scanners, augmented reality visors). More specifically, the Report analyses how the digital technologies Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have now come into industrial use, providing an overview of the main technologies (software and hardware), industrial areas of application, in addition to the main qualitative and quantitative benefits to be gained from their implementation.