Spatial Spotlight: ViSU Elomatic

"Spatial Spotlight" is a series sharing a Spatial8 ecosystem partner's story.

TURKU, FINLAND (November 18, 2021) – Elomatic ViSU is a competency

unit within Elomatic providing visual 3D services for our industrial projects. The engineering work Elomatic does gives ViSU the 3D raw ingredients and detailed technical knowhow to accurately communicate operating principles of industrial machinery in both customer surface and training. By optimizing 3D CAD materials, we are able to extend the lifetime value of Elomatic’s engineer design work and create numerous virtual solutions to provide value in a variety of use cases.

We innovate new solutions at the forefront of industrial 3D and XR technologies due to our unique position. Given in depth access to technical projects through Elomatic, we get to discuss with our clients on a level that would be out of reach for many others. We have superior expertise to anyone else to create training materials and communicative 3D animations to our clients, in cases where our own engineers designed the maintenance procedures and created the maintenance documents. By recreating those technical materials in 3D we make them accessible to more stakeholders along the product life cycle, leveraging existing work and making most of the value of that work. That is why our work is cost efficient and of the highest quality - a truly trustworthy partner to work with!

ViSU’s mission is to connect digitalization to virtualization through 3D models. Virtualization means creating 3D applications that better convey digital information to end users. While the huge amounts of data created by sensors gives insight to analysts and experts, that insight is often disconnected from the people in the field. Frontline workers, comprising the majority of the industrial workforce, are managed based on the flows of data processed in what they can perceive as “far-away control rooms”. That distance between expert analysts and the people in the field is precisely what ViSU aims to shorten, closing the gap and bringing these parties into closer collaboration with one another.

In practice our experience stems from visualization. We’ve done 3D animations, UI design and concept visualizations for over a decade. This has brought our team an amazing ability to manipulate and refine 3D materials into a new form. Along that process we have created our virtual pipeline for optimizing 3D models to a more lightweight form from their technical design model counterparts. This cost-efficient pipeline is what has put us in the position to utilize XR technologies to start innovating something completely new.

And so today we have created one of the most interesting VR use cases in Finland: the Valmet Virtual Mill. After creating a virtual twin of the Valmet paper and board machine, we have been given the chance to delve deeper into VR training and other XR possibilities circling around the ideas of virtualization. By 'virtualization' we mean the creation of interactive 3D applications to tackle various needs in business. While on the consumer side, we are hearing more and more about the Metaverse with their social spaces and 3D avatars and virtual showrooms for virtual fashion, on the business-to-business side virtualization means something a bit different. 3D models are not created to make things more interesting but clearer and more communicative. Just like 3D animations are able to give us x-ray vision inside complicated technical machinery, virtual applications let us clarify our message to get the job done faster and more accurately.

Concrete examples of these virtual solutions are VR environments, where one can view a whole production line in 3D to see how it operates or how to maintain certain parts of it. The ability to see the model with high immersion 3D through a VR-headset gives viewers confidence that they understand what they are seeing, which can be helpful in both sales and training.

AR and mobile viewers can bring the 3D models onto the field. What has been learned in VR and analyzed in control rooms is brought onto the factory floor through mobile technologies. Being able to compare a 3D model from a tablet while looking at the machine in the same space gives a chance for people to discuss tasks at hand without confusion. Better yet, overlaying the 3D content on top of the machine operated or maintained can provide field operators real-time instructions, while keeping their hands free to do the work.

All of these various potential use cases are made into reality with Elomatic technical documentation and detailed industrial planning. Utilizing that information effectively is crucial for any company looking for a market leadership position. An innovative and value creating approach to just that is to transform that documentation into more informative 3D, to enable faster time to market, avoid errors and ensure customer satisfaction.

Better quality, faster operations, less costs. What more is even needed?

Learn more at ViSU | Elomatic Visualization Solutions and contact us to level up your industrial XR solutions.