Prepare your business for the power of Experience Engineering
The technologies to build Real-time 3D environments are advancing rapidly, much of which is thanks to advances in the video games industry, as well as in storage and processing power, and scanning technologies that can quickly digitize objects.
In a few years, companies that set themselves up correctly can build these 3D environments and experiences quickly and accurately. They can link them to real-time data feeds so that their virtual environment updates in line with their real equivalents. Doing all this will require skills in 3D software, spatial computing, simulation, data management, and user experience design to ensure 3D experiences are hyper-personalized.
However, being able to do this quickly and routinely also requires solid foundations. Those hoping to deliver transformation through 3D in five years will need to work on the digital platforms on which these virtual experiences – as well as many other digital capabilities –
will run. The time to act is now, and the importance of this preparation cannot be overstated.
To understand platforms, imagine you want to go into the property business, with a plan to quickly build and manage ten houses around the country, and grow from there. You could go out to 10 different builders and tell them what you want, and you’d end up with 10 different designs. They may all be good designs, but they will all be different and therefore hard to manage. This complexity underscores the need for a unified approach. You have to maintain a large working knowledge so you are ready to fix a wide range of things that could go wrong. If you make a change – say fire safety rules change and you are obliged to make upgrades – you have to solve this problem for each house individually. If you want to replicate one design, you need to go back to the original builder who may not be available.
In software, this is what we call a platform. It is the shared infrastructure that all developers have access to and are required to use. It provides a single shared space in the cloud for software developers to work, and where they can access pre-vetted development tools and microservices (‘building blocks’ of reusable code for common applications such as user identification or image processing, that can be deployed into many products), follow software development frameworks, and check products against company standards.
Platform engineering aims to build this platform, so developers have a consistent set of tools. They can focus on coding and innovation without worrying about the operational aspects or whether their software product will work within the company’s infrastructure. Because it sets shared approaches, it makes automation, testing, and scaling much easier. It means everyone is working with the same approach, so anyone can go in and make changes or upgrades, even if the original designer has left.
Or you can set up a shared set of tools and practices that the 10 builders could follow – define the concrete mix, the bricks, standard approaches to wiring and plumbing, the approach to record keeping, etc. The builders still have creative freedom to create a product that meets your goals, but the fundamentals are consistent across all houses. A plumber or electrician can enter any house and know what to expect. That makes fixes, changes, and creating new buildings much easier.
Developing something as complex as Real-time 3D environments will only be efficient with a good underlying platform. Without it, each experience has to be designed from scratch and may be hard to integrate with company data feeds – which may be in different formats – hard to update, and costly to maintain.
On the other hand, a good platform will set the foundations for companies to spin up virtual environments based on a clear set of standards, approaches, and VR software design tools, and draw on real-world products and operations data, which is easy to find, use and integrate.
While we are focusing on 3D here, platforms are vital to the growing array of software-defined products that companies operate. They are particularly critical as complexity increases – as is the case in 3D – and are also highly valuable for any software that needs to scale across multiple product lines. For example, many products involve multiple software systems, including operating systems, product software that provides the functionality (e.g. assisted driving), and embedded software which controls the device. It is vital these are all build around the same standards and can all talk to each other. Likewise Real-Time 3D introduces new forms of software and hardware into the system, with new layers of complexity. But it must still communicate with all the other systems, so it must be built on a platform.
Software is increasingly becoming a part of the physical world, so companies must invest in robust, consistent approaches to develop it at scale across multiple products, services, and business units.
In doing so, they should focus on a strong foundation of embedded software and platform engineering today, to ensure their growing suites of digital products are based on solid foundations. That brings many immediate benefits, but it also sets them up well to build the virtual experience that will transform their businesses in a few years.
