Emerging Extended Reality Technologies for Industry 4.0: Early Experiences with Conception, Design, Implementation, Evaluation and Deployment

In the fast-developing world of Industry 4.0, which combines Extended Reality (XR) technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), creating location aware applications to interact with smart objects and smart processes via Cloud Computing strategies enabled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), factories and processes can be automated and machines can be enabled with self-monitoring capabilities. Smart objects are given the ability to analyze and communicate with each other and their human co-workers, delivering the opportunity for much smoother processes, and freeing up workers for other tasks. Industry 4.0 enabled smart objects can be monitored, designed, tested and controlled via their digital twins, and these processes and controls are visualized in VR/AR. The Industry 4.0 technologies provide powerful, largely unexplored application areas that will revolutionize the way we work, collaborate and live our lives. It is important to understand the opportunities and impact of the new technologies and the effects from a production, safety and societal point of view.

Jolanda G. Tromp is a Human-Computer Interaction expert for User-Centered design and evaluation of new technologies (VR/AR/AI/IoT), with 20 years' experience as principal Usability investigator. She has a PhD in Systematic Usability Design and Evaluation for Collaborative Virtual Environments, 2001, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, a BSc in Psychology (with honors) University of Amsterdam, Holland (1995). She is a research consultant for the Center of Visualization and Simulation at Duy Tan University, Vietnam; for the Mixed Reality Task Group of the State University of New York; and for the global Simulations Working Group.

Dac-Nhuong Le is PhD Deputy-Head of Faculty of Information Technology, Haiphong University, Vietnam. His areas of research include: evolutionary computation, specialized with evolutionary multiobjective optimization, approximate algorithms, network communication, security and vulnerability, network performance analysis and simulation, cloud computing, image processing in biomedical. His core work in evolutionary multi-objective optimization, network security, wireless, mobile computing and virtual reality. He has edited several books for the Wiley-Scrivener imprint.

Chung Van Le is Vice-Director Center of Visualization and Simulation. He has a MSc in Computer Science from Duy Tan University, 2011, Vietnam and a BSc in Computer Science at Da Nang University, 2004, Vietnam. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Duy Tan University, Vietnam. He researches medical image processing, e-Health, virtual simulation in medicine. He is Duy Tan University Lead Software Developer for 3D virtual body system for teaching anatomy and virtual endoscopic techniques for medical students.