Masters of Pie: Embracing Technology Enablers – Building the Collaborative Thread
The COVID- 19 pandemic has focused the Enterprise sector on the need for immersive collaboration. The widespread adoption of video conferencing tools is resolving the immediate need to bring people together however what manufacturing and engineering companies require are collaborative tools to bring both people and data together. Masters of Pie as a technology leader in building real-time immersive collaboration solutions is actively delivering the solution for building out the collaborative thread.
The first part of this series of blogs from Masters of Pie addressed the key requirements in building the foundations for effective real-time collaboration (integrate, create and collaborate) as detailed here. This second part in this series will highlight how the adoption of real-time immersive collaboration will be dramatically accelerated by the roll out of new technology enablers such as server-side rendering, virtual GPU, edge computing and 5G connectivity.
Immersive Technology Inhibitors
The adoption in the Enterprise sector of immersive collaboration technologies is currently inhibited by a number of challenges;
AR and VR experiences are constrained by a combination of bandwidth and computing power resulting in either a distance limitation or tethered experience
Headset form factors are heavy, cumbersome and not fit for manufacturing and factory applications
The existing Enterprise IT may not support a high enough specification (personal computers GPU) to enable immersive experiences.
Enterprise infrastructure often does not have the connectivity bandwidth and coverage to support low latency streaming and the ability to manage the 3D data sizes and complexity.
The Enterprise 3D datasets are frequently not set up for collaboration, it may not be in easily accessible, easily shared locations, and the data is frequently tied to the associated authoring / editing tools.
Conferencing tools today such as Zoom, Teams, Slack, etc. have limited to no support for complex 3D data sets. Collaborating in real time on 3D data is currently not being addressed by conventional conferencing services.
Embrace New Technology Enablers – “Go Mobile”
The adoption of virtual GPU and rendering in the cloud for remote streaming allows users to untether their immersive devices and go mobile. In this article, NVIDIA’s Senior Manager for Enterprise XR Greg Jones explores how NVIDIA Cloud XR will accelerate this digital transformation. The receiving application on the device itself may be lightweight and leverage the cloud (public or private) to do the heavy lifting to ‘drive’ the application. The Radical cloud configuration leverages the capabilities of the cloud and edge compute to render the images on the server-side and then stream the output to the mobile device (AR, VR, mobile and desktop).
This removes the need for any data to be present on the mobile or local device for both efficiency purposes (easy to send a simple browser link for collaboration) and security (no data footprint on the device).
The roll out of low latency 5G technology in combination with server side rendering will open up the potential to stream to immersive devices such as AR and VR. Radical is already able to stream the immersive experience to the browser for mobile and desktop consumption, as the frame rate requirements are lower and would be supported via 4G and current WiFi connectivity.
Read the full article here. Embracing Technology Enablers – Building the Collaborative Thread
See more about the work of AREA member Masters of Pie on their AREA member profile.