3 minute read
Juergen Dold
Building a Smart Digital Reality
BY JUERGEN DOLD
President, GSI, Hexagon AB
As digitalization has progressed, Hexagon is driving the adoption of a ‘smart digital reality’ that is simpler, easier to access and more affordable. To that end, we have focused our innovation around the miniaturization and simplification of reality capture technologies. The most recent example of this strategy is the Leica BLK product line. For us, at Hexagon AB, this was (and still is) the most disruptive reality capture portfolio available.
The next step is enabling greater levels of autonomy, which requires robotic applications along with simultaneous location and mapping solutions. This is what we mean by ‘smart digital reality’ which has been Hexagon’s vision for more than a decade — fusing the physical world with its accurate digital counterpart along with digital processes that drive increasing levels of automation and ultimately, sustainable outcomes for our customers. Our HxDR digital reality platform is a great example of a collaborative solution that enables users to converge and visualize almost any geospatial or reality capture data to build business processes that overcome challenges such as those related to developing green cities. Metaverse, the driving force The idea of a smart digital reality goes beyond Digital Twins. It can however be likened to a Metaverse. Smart digital realities bring together people, places and things in a 3D representation of the physical environment where people can interact through information-sharing to create new processes that solve some of our most challenging business problems. A smart digital reality is a part of the Metaverse that will always have a real, one-to-one connection with the physical world.
The Metaverse helps in driving digitalization, thereby driving new business models in the consumer market. On the other hand, current demand for our smart digital realities comes mostly from professional markets. In my view, there will come a point where consumer and professional demand for digital realities will converge.
Multiple methods The Metaverse is basicallya combination of multiple methods. So are smart digital realities. For example, in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, we build simulations to create models that can help us find solutions to problems in the real world. Thus, it involves the interaction of multiple disciplines on one platform to get a common view from different angles for different kinds of users. In the Metaverse there can be separate platforms for shoppers, entertainment consumers and real estate buyers for instance. But again, a platform like HxDR is necessary. That is why we feel that we don’t need to completely change what we do but just keep innovating. Multiple business models in one We have the most powerful and sophisticated sensors and software to capture and update reality. That’s where we lead the wave. But we are also working on new business models that will help us keep more customers up to date, including data and information licensing and processing services. All of this data enables the creation of smart digital realities — accurate representations of the physical space that can be updated in real time.
Growing industry Today, several players in the industry, such as those providing Cloud services, are shifting their attention towards the Metaverse. Hexagon has been pioneering this space for ten to twenty years. Two decades ago, when Google Earth and Microsoft Bing started, photogrammetry, which wasn’t too well known, suddenly gained great momentum. Today, we have digital reality which can be used to build smart processes. The resulting smart digital reality will end up accelerating the pace of adoption of geospatial solutions.
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ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
