A key challenge with AR and VR : Getting people on-board

Implementing new technology for data visualization, such as augmented and mixed reality, poses unique challenges. The integration of these advanced technologies requires overcoming obstacles related to hardware compatibility, data processing and interpretation, user experience design, and privacy and security concerns.

Geo Week recently conducted interviews with professionals who have been actively exploring and implementing advanced visualization techniques in their real-world workflows. These experts offered valuable insights and approaches to tackle the challenges associated with integrating these technologies. The results of these discussions can be found in the downloadable report, "Navigating the Next Era of 3D Visualization.

Emily Olman, CEO and Chief Media Officer at Hopscotch Interactive says that sometimes you need to push for more widespread implementation.

The challenge is that you typically will have one or two “pioneers” at a company, or people whose job has an element of innovation strategy in them. At the earliest stage of trying to get buy-in at a company, one of the problems is: Let's do a proof of concept. Let's do this slow, very old-school way of onboarding and testing. But in many cases, the coolest, new- est, most innovative technology is probably not going to survive waiting for your $20,000 proof-of-concept every six months.

If you really want innovation to happen quickly, I think you need to be able to assign more resources to it, and not just have one guy who gets to spend 10% of his time on innovation. You have to really commit to this. This has to be part of your company culture. That way, new companies who have service offerings have a counterpart and an informed audience so you can greenlight things a lot faster.

For Mark Franklin at Kleinfelder, it is an ongoing process that involves educating their staff.

“Currently for us, one of the most difficult things is that there are so many different types of data collection solutions and workflows that it’s hard for us to wade through the weeds of what should be implemented for our work. There are lots of solutions that provide different benefits and deliverables - but figuring out the entire solution for what fits the needs of our company is tough. You often need one de- vice and software to collect data for one type of solution but then need something totally different for another solution. Then you need to figure out a way to bring that data all together to provide an end deliverable that meets our needs. Currently, it often can be done but you need to be a jack of all trades and use a lot of different platforms to get what you need. There are certain people that can do it and piece it together but the workflows are clunky and complicated.

With a company where we have 3,000 people, it can be hard to implement and is a big challenge. So we continue to take “baby steps” where we can and look for better workflows and ways to execute projects that will fit our team. Educating our staff on innovative solutions is also key as they are most often the ones that are able to see a better way to do something within their current workflows when presented with these new ideas. I feel like a lot of people can see the vision of what’s to come but it’s currently a bit complex to get exactly what you want at times. It’s an ex- citing time to be in the engineering world as we look forward to what is coming.”

To learn more about how advanced visualization techniques are beginning to be implemented, as well as some the challenges they are facing, download the full free report here.