Five Questions With: David Randle

David Randle has more than 12 years of experience helping to strategize, design, build and execute businesses, products and experiences in the design-software industry. As the senior business development manager at Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp., which has offices in Johnston, he’s responsible for new business and market creation, including emerging extended-reality technology.

PBN: Just to refresh our readers, what is the difference between AR, VR and XR?

RANDLE: Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), collectively XR (extended reality), are technologies that enable deeper and more meaningful interaction with digital data.

VR refers to immersing the user into a fully virtual world. Picture diving into your screen, into a video game. That’s what VR feels like.

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AR and derivatives such as mixed reality (MR) refers to digital content intermixing with the real world. AR lets users see and interact with digital data through tablets and phones or exotic wearables. Picture pointing your smartphone at your coffee machine – and the operating instructions pop up on your screen.

PBN: In terms of designing things such as buildings or products, what do these technologies offer?

RANDLE: Designing anything effectively requires a process known as design thinking. This process encourages rapid iteration of ideas to refine the objective as much as possible in a given amount of time. New technologies directly increase the throughput of ideas and design confidence, thereby making the design-thinking process more effective. The value of these technologies are significant. XR serves different purposes in the design process.

VR specifically is great for evaluating designs while they are being developed, enabling a tighter iteration loop. Imagine being able to see a new design of a beverage dispenser at 1:1 scale, walk around it, cycle through multiple design configurations, and even see how the design interplays with the mechanical internals – all before any costly physical prototype is produced or a physical part is manufactured. Now imagine the value of this level of validation for new-car designs, proposed buildings, heavy equipment, etc. VR helps validate the adage “seeing is believing,” while still supporting flexibility to make changes early in the design process.

AR/MR offer similar value, with the ability to view a design in the context of the real world, thereby making the believability of a design better. This is especially useful when selling designs internally or externally to other stakeholders. AR/MR extend the digital experience beyond the design phase too, with benefits in sales and marketing, training and post-sales servicing. Using the beverage dispenser example, imagine having all the options available in a VR experience but being able to show prospective buyers what the dispenser looks like sitting in their store, replacing its predecessor.

Finally, these technologies help us realize the closest form of true collaboration that we’ve been able to experience yet. Web meetings have created significant business efficiencies. The ability to meet in virtual worlds, incorporate 3D models into collaborative sessions, host guided tours, product demos or teach entire classes in a much more engaging way provides new and better ways to communicate ideas.

PBN: What is the value to a business in adopting these technologies for design in terms of cost?

RANDLE: These technologies helped shave many months off new product development in the aerospace industry (new design revealed … in a six-month time frame versus an over-three-year time frame); generate more successful products at launch, which is hard to put a value on; and even create emotional connections to design and products among product developers and customers.

Outside of design, huge benefits are being realized with more-effective training of the workforce of tomorrow, safer analysis of dangerous environments and more-efficient field-support services. We are witnessing the broad and impactful benefit to business implementing strategies around XR.

These are truly “win-win” opportunities. The investment required to reap benefits continues to come down. Total cost of ownership for effective systems is in the low thousands of dollars, and dropping annually, so there really shouldn’t be anything prohibiting evaluating how these technologies can impact any business.

PBN: Is the design industry where AR and VR will be doing the most disrupting?

RANDLE: The design industry tends to be [an] early adopter of emerging technologies. … Although these technologies are disrupting the design industry as we speak, a more major impact is on the horizon for the manufacturing industry. If we consider the benefits of these technologies outside the design workflow [as] mentioned above, there are more opportunities for disruption across all areas of business. Training and education is one of the hottest applications for these technologies. … Add the other advantages to other business units [such as] sales and marketing, and post-sales and service, and you have a set of technologies that can, and will, affect significant change across entire businesses and industries.

PBN: What is something about AR/VR that might surprise people?

RANDLE: There is a magical nature to these technologies when someone experiences them. There is no shortage of YouTube videos of people reacting to XR experiences for the first time. This may represent the honeymoon period, but what I find surprises people most is when they have the “ah-ha” moment, realizing there is an opportunity in their domain that immediately reveals itself. We are consistently surprised by the attention this topic gets among C-level executives.

On a lighter note, something surprising that most don’t know is that VR has been around since 1968. It was first invented by Ivan Sutherland and one of his students, Bob Sproull. Who knew it would take 50 years to reach our current inflection point of technology, cost and demand? In terms of AR, most people don’t know that a projector is technically augmented reality … and has been around for a very long time too.

Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.