Looking out of the panoramic windows from the seventeenth floor of PTC's new headquarters in the Innovation District of Boston's seaport delivers stunning views of Boston Harbour and the downtown area. Spectacular though the view is it is not the leading light on the 17th floor, that distinction is reserved for a small team nestled to one side that has a vision for how augmented reality (AR) could dramatically change the factory environment.
Leaving the PLM highway
Before the move to the Boston Innovation District, PTC was situated in the Boston suburb of Needham at the north end of the so-called PLM Highway. The 19-mile stretch of State Road 128 was home to the six top global PLM vendors – aside from PTC that included Dassault Systems, Autodesk, Siemens, SAP, and Oracle. But PTC decided to leave their long-term home to enable them to attract the type of talent required to drive the company forward in this age of emerging technologies.
Since its launch just over 30 years ago, PTC has led the way in CAD and PLM but in recent years that portfolio has grown to include innovative technologies such as augmented reality. "The market now is about AI, AR, VR, 5G, cloud, edge and high-performance computing," Jim Heppelmann, president and chief executive officer explains. "If you want to play in those areas, you need to get the top graduates. But they do not want to work in a suburban area, we can't easily pull these people out to the suburbs.
"In fact, it really was driven home for me when I tried to hire one of the industry's top AR experts. He said he wanted to work for us but that he didn't want to buy a car. He said he had five job offers and the other four didn't require him to buy a car."
Leading innovation from the Reality Lab
The answer was the 17-story building, 121 Seaport, that became PTC's home when it opened earlier this year. Aside from the 1,000 PTC employees, a crucial element of the new environment is the Customer Experience Centre (CXC) that takes up the top floor of the building. Tucked in amongst the working examples of Industrial IoT is the PTC Reality Lab.
This small band of innovators is representational of the future of PTC along with the benefits of their new location. For the Reality Lab have been acquired, or hired, from the world-famous MIT Media labs. The team of five from MIT are led by the enigmatic Valentin Heun, VP of Innovation Engineering, and lead scientist in the lab.
"Media Lab is a wonderful place, but it has a lifespan," Heun said of his decision to join PTC. "I had completed my master's and Ph.D. at the Media Lab, so it was time to move on."
Making technology ubiquitous
At MIT, Heun had researched AR for six years, working on the user interfaces. During that period, he looked at the scope of AR in consumer products and children toys and began to understand that the potential to scale was the granularity of technology around us.
Therefore, when it came to looking for a career path, he was seeking an environment where there was the highest granularity of technology, and he decided that it was not the home. "The home has maybe a few light switches, a coffee maker, and so on," he says. "That's it. A maximum of five things that we can automate. A phone can even be a remote for that.
"In the factory, there are millions of sensors, motors, robots, and machines and problems with humans interacting with machines. There's such a high density of spatial problems that this is the perfect playground to research the future of augmented reality."
Making a worker a wizard
Heun is used to achieving every goal he sets himself. When the team joined PTC from MIT they had a six-year track record of success. "We had six years of spot-on research," he says. "Not one single project that I've had my hands on went into the trash, everything was streamlining because there's always a certain vision at the end of that research."
At its core, Heun's vision is straightforward. He wants what he calls an every-day Joe to be able to enter a place that is filled with technology and be able to tell that location his intentions for the lights, the robots, and the machines.
"He should be like a wizard," he adds. "He should be empowered with superpowers to tell the room what his intention is. In the past, factories were simple: they were mechanical, everyone could see how the mechanics worked. Now they have complex machines that need desktop interfaces to organize them. A desktop is modeled after literally a desk, so it's good for work that you can do on a desk. It's not meant for a factory.
"We're pushing all our organizing work into the best factories. That means that the normal factory worker is unable to interact with that because he needs three years of training to learn how to look at the factory through a desktop."
Solving a spatial problem
The goal here is to make the factory a spatial problem. "As humans, we are spatially empowered," Heun explains. "We have superpowers in our brain to understand space. Everyone has that. Every child has that. At the moment that you put the interaction with these factories into that space where they are, you literally could enable children to operate a factory. That is how easy it is."
Heun and his team have prototyped a tool that they are developing with Lego, and allowed children to program it successfully. "I told our chairman that although this is only a small Lego toy, it can also work for a big machine. The interface is the same.
"We expect more and more from our factories, or from the world that we live in. We made everything digital, and now we want to make the real world digital as well, but we don't have the right interface for that.
"The desktop is not the right interface. It's a bottleneck. We have a limit. At the moment we need to expand our skills with more and more training, and so less and less people can do it. They call them experts. Why? Why do we have to hire somebody with an MIT engineering degree to run a factory that before you could hire somebody and tell them in a week what to do and he's just able to do it? It makes no sense. But we are changing that."
