Guy Bieber is from Citrix and he is from the office of the CTO. He showed a video of AR concepts – involving architecture and remote medicine.
When you want to make a change, you have to have pain or gain, he said. The first question is “where is the pain?”. People these days are “Infotoxicated” For professionals, information overload is a really difficult topic. There is 50% more data per year in medicine and at the same time, 87% of workers are ‘disengaged’ from their jobs. Combined with millenials that want to do their own thing, this disengagement is a challenge for continued learning. There are big increases in the number of people that are freelancing. Pay rates for freelancers are increasing.
Bieber said that 50% of the workforce will be remote by 2020. Furthermore, 47% of jobs will be replaced by robotics – even ‘service’ jobs are going away. He said that a ‘Robotic Macdonalds’ would open in Phoenix next month.
Bieber recommended The Digital Renaissance of Work: Delivering Digital Workplaces Fit for the Future as a book about how the enterprise is evolving as it goes digital.
Facilities cost is very high and getting worse as so many facilities are only partly used. Costs have to reduce in facilities because of remote working. Bieber said that you have to think how you use space. Innovation speed is increasing.
He believes that “mixed reality” may help to do this. He said that much of the work is about “filtering, processing and understanding” and big displays help. New ways to exploit how the human brain really works are needed. Bieber referred to the very powerful spatial memory that humans have, which is generally under-exploited in current information systems.
On the other hand, big high resolution displays can cost a lot and near to eye (NTE) displays are getting better and better. He foresees a time of “infinte displays”, but, he said (and this might be a bit contentious with our readers) “NTE will mean the death of traditional displays”. (We have asked him for an interview to get more on this – and if he is let off the PR leash – we’ll bring it to you.)
The current state of eyewear is not great and Bieber said that the value of a solution has to be higher than the “cumbersomeness”. He was heavily involved in a past job with the military Land Warrior project and he said that the early versions of this meant soldiers carrying a lot of extra batteries in addition to the heavy loads they had, but they did it because of the benefits.
He continued by saying that there are still a lot of questions about mixed reality. For example, what do you do if multiple people are looking at the same scene? How do you decide who should see what and how do you share virtual objects? How long should objects persist?
He also said that if you can mix virtual and real reality, there are lots of things you can do. For example, if you have have a light dimmer, why not adjust it by simply looking at the lamp and “turning it” in mid-air?
Bieber finished by saying that hardware and software platforms really need to become pervasive to promote adoption.
