For sure you have heard, hopefully also read/seen about Ready Player One, the famous book from Ernest Cline (2010) and the later movie from Steven Spielberg (2018). What striked me the most was the convincing part of that technology, the easiness of it and the adaption willingness. Yes, we can question the societal plot and if we really want to live that way in the future – time will tell and there are different opinions to that for sure. But coming back to the technology – integrating gamification, augmenting and therefor enriching the Real World is a super fascinating topic for me.
In an Apparel Plant in Izmir we flirted with and deployed a lot of AR/VR/MR gadgets and for example used VR for employee self-learning sessions. Here every Newbie had the chance to learn in his particular speed, in his particular way towards the topics. And because of the „best in class“ teachers/colleagues that where recorded for the sessions, they also had the best possible teachers for their learning experience. No surprise that the people liked it and the training efforts and timing were cut in half. Also video projectors to display calibrated patterns on pressing tables were installed, easy to use for the operators and saving a lot of paper waste. It is the easiness of these „gadgets“ that make them so convincing and effective at the same time.
Last week I had a wonderful VidCo ( or shall I say ZoCo ☺ ) with Roy Rodenhäuser in London, he is the Creative Technologist at RYOT Studio, Verizon Media, about his latest case study he did on the Hololens 2. He made a proto which is again so convincing that I cannot help to name it groundbreaking for the apparel industry. You should absolutely watch it:
Probably 15 years ago I had a colleague in the design department who would ask frequently for the 2D trouser and jacket paper patterns to then sit at home and draw lines and pockets and stitchings with an Edding pen onto the paper up to the moment when he liked it and then gave it back to us and asked for the first proto. Not only did it safe time and money but for him it was a fast and easy way to have a clearer picture of the outcome. For us it was much more than just getting a vague and undefined explanation of what the designer had in mind. We could immediately step into the operational excellence part and determine the best possible workmanship aso. – Ultimately great at that time, yet analogue.
Now you watch the case of Roy – designing in realtime, with real paint on real paper and then seeing the results immediately on an AR fit model at the desk – in action, in movement, in shape – that‘s phenomenal. Think about this for a moment when this case becomes a mature software. Think of the endless possibilites and the easiness for designers to step into AR, not leaving their traditional and haptic work but just adding a new layer on it, which in addition is easy to transfer, move, adjust, multiply…
More experiments here please!
Enjoy the week
(and give this man the ressources he deserves..)