philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Toward natural interfaces – AR at NGRAIN

NGRAIN is an industrial augmented reality [AR] and virtual reality [VR] company.

Use cases;

Familiarization. For a novice technician who needs to work on a piece of equipment, our technology will provide access to information about individual parts that the technician might have never seen or touched before.

Automated damage assessment and visual inspection. This capability is particularly useful in manufacturing situations where products require very tight levels of tolerance.

[AR through tablets today, smart glasses later.]

For AR to take off, the ability to rapidly create, manage, edit, and deploy 3-D content is one of the problems that should be addressed.

Our authoring solution, NGRAIN Vergence, allows you to create and deploy AR and VR content without writing any code.

There has been some work in the use of gesture interfaces in AR and VR, such as the six degrees of freedom input or multidimensional input methods. But the problem of building an interaction language that can be used on a device that works in the real world is not fully solved yet. In addition, the solution must be robust enough to work in a general-purpose setting, including low light or bright light, indoors or outdoors, and so on.

I believe we as an industry will evolve to a point where interface isn’t necessarily about an interaction language. Instead, we will create systems that are smart enough or intelligent enough to interpret the context in which you’re working. The system will know what you are doing, and it will anticipate what you will do next. This capability will move the interaction from deterministic to probabilistic scenarios.

Ultimately, the deterministic and probabilistic will combine, so the system will rely on not just gesture alone, but a combination of context, voice, gestures, touch, and so forth as the means of rich interaction. The interactions will become truly natural. I think such technology is on its way.

Today we have the ability to do what is called optically transparent AR—the ability to use the tracking technology in conjunction with our rendering engine to overlay graphics on top of the physical pieces of equipment.

See the full story here: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology-forecast/augmented-reality/interviews/barry-po-ngrain.html