DigitalituM Podcast - At the Intersection of Manufacturing and Digital Transformation

DigitalituM Podcast Episode 8 - Julian Hermle - CMC ViewR - 3D CAD visualization with VR

• DigitalituM - Digitalization tools for Manufacturing • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Discover the captivating journey of Julian Helmle, co-founder of CMC Engineers, as he takes us from the prestigious halls of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz to the cutting-edge realm of virtual reality in manufacturing. Julian's passion for VR is palpable as he recounts his mission to democratize this revolutionary technology, making it accessible and affordable for industrial projects. We promise you'll walk away with insights into how VR not only enhances design and manufacturing processes but also transforms marketing and sales strategies through immersive experiences.

Explore the transformative power of virtual reality in product development, breaking down communication barriers and accelerating decision-making across all stages from design to sales. Julian shares compelling examples, like the impact of VR on the excavator industry, illustrating how this technology streamlines prototyping, reduces modifications, and speeds up production timelines. Delve into the potential of VR to foster superior products and better outcomes, as we discuss its invaluable role in engaging stakeholders through realistic simulations and customized configurations.

Finally, look ahead with us as we envision the future of CMC Engineers and their ambition to become leaders in the 3D visualization and simulation space. Julian's unwavering belief in Unity 3D technology fuels a vision where interactive presentations and integrated 3D data become standard in product development. Join us for a glimpse into this exciting future, where innovation meets practicality, and experience firsthand the advancements in 3D and virtual reality that are set to revolutionize the machinery and plant engineering industries.

Stay tuned for more inspiring conversations about manufacturing and digital transformation. Also, remember to follow and subscribe to the DigitalituM Podcast for exclusive insights from industry leaders and innovators.

We appreciate your likes and comments. If you feel you can add value to this podcast series and want to be our guest, send an email to Sales@DigitalituM.com

Markus Rimmele:

Hello everyone. This is Markus Rimmel with the Digitalitum podcast at the intersection of manufacturing and digital transformation. Our guest today is Julian Helmle from CMC, Viewer from the beautiful Swabian Alp in southwest Germany. Good to have you here on the podcast. How are you doing?

Julian Hermle:

Hey, markus, good to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation. Everything is fine here.

Markus Rimmele:

Glad to hear that we met each other in July this year, but let's start with you, Julian. Tell us a little bit about your professional career. How did you get started and how did you end up with CMC Engineering?

Julian Hermle:

Yeah, sure. So my name is Julian and I started my professional career within the automotive manufacturing company Porsche. I was pretty much into that, like sports car topics, but always in the after sales department. Actually, porsche sent me also to Miami. What Porsche is doing from Miami is all the sales and after sales business for Latin America. From there on, it was a worldwide crisis and at that time in 2010, I luckily had the chance to transfer to Mercedes-Benz and there was the first time I got in touch with virtual reality, because I had the chance to work in the aftersales department of Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicles in order to establish a virtual reality service center yeah, looking into commercial vehicles of the future and how to maintain them in a like, easier and more ergonomic way. After establishing the virtual reality center there in stuttgart which was a very exciting time because virtual reality meant back then was a big back projection with 3d glasses and was very expensive, so only affordable for the big OEMs, for example.

Markus Rimmele:

Yeah, at this time it was really very, very special Computing, the hardware, everything was super expensive and not available at your regular electronic store to buy.

Julian Hermle:

No, not at all. So that was like really rocket science for me. Like I got in there and experienced the technology and I remember like I got home from the interview and I like told my girlfriend back then, which is now my wife I said this is like crazy stuff. I have the feeling that I have to get into that because it sounds promising and it looks promising Even back then. I started to think with colleagues how can we get this technology into a broader field of users? How can we make it accessible to other customers, Because not only Airbus or Mercedes or John Deere back then should make use of this technology, because it has these benefits for everyone who is manufacturing any kind of mechanical part or mechanical machine or whatever vehicle.

Julian Hermle:

I got the offer from the producer of that virtual reality software and systems to switch from Mercedes to that producer, which was back then a company called ICI do. It was kind of a startup back then. No one ever used like the word startup in 2012, but they did actually, and so I got into there and that was also like very, very impressive time because they sent me with these kind of large VR systems, but already kind of a suitcase size, all around the world and the people you showed that to never saw that before, so it was for them always that kind of aha moment.

Julian Hermle:

That was really like that was really, you know, like kind of a gold rush feeling, because like you got there and said like look this. And they were like what the hell is that? It's kind of like out of the world experience. But the big problem back then was the cost of investment. Like there was no entry price. This like all started at, let's say, 150 to 200,000 euros or dollars more or less back then, and so almost no one was able to afford it in a small or medium-sized enterprise.

Julian Hermle:

That was actually that thought I had still from Mercedes. I took over to ICI do and said, like somehow I have to make this technology accessible. And that was actually like the birth of CMC, because I back then decided to quit my job and I said I want to try it on my own. So I had the great chance to purchase a virtual reality system. Unfortunately, a partner of ICI do was like running out of business, and so we took over that system and I was already working with Max, my founding partner, and he was the crazy guy who decided to start that adventure with me, and that was in 2014. So we actually turned 10. Wow, congratulations. Thank you very much. Hard to believe that we made it until then because we are a self-financed company, so this means like we only have private equity, which is our money. 100% of CMC is actually like within the company.

Markus Rimmele:

So no big venture capital money with you guys.

Julian Hermle:

We are also not planning it. Yeah, we're also not planning it. So this is like one of our use piece. We own the company and we decide what we are going to do.

Markus Rimmele:

That's a pretty incredible story in how you get to there and actually also a great startup story in how you found the company All right. Next question is what you now actually do with CMC Engineers and what's your product and service.

Julian Hermle:

Yes. So, as I said, we founded in 2014 and pretty early we got a third founder inside. Marcus joined us. He's our development leader and he's doing all the architecture of everything, and he also brought Unity 3D into our company, which is one of our main pillars All our services and products are based on.

Julian Hermle:

So we back then had some requests from companies who were asking us is it somehow possible to do like real time 3D, which is actually virtual reality and extended reality and everything is real time 3D? Back then we started to use Unity in industrial projects and that was like very unique because in 2014, unity was almost plainly gaming was almost plainly gaming. So, yeah, we started to use Unity and started to work with CAD data because we were used to it. With that software, icidu we were still using back then. One fun fact we never sold a license of ICIDU, although we had been a reseller. So it was just not like fitting to the industry here in Germany, like small and medium-sized companies are not purchasing software anymore for 100,000 euros.

Julian Hermle:

And that was actually the founding of our product, because then I said there has to be something which is affordable, which is easy to use, and back then we established our software, cmu-r, which was released in 2017. And so we did kind of like one and a half year services with other software and then we started implementing our own and in 2017, at the Hannover Fair, we presented our very, very first version, which was a CAD file and it was like a two-button software. Which was a CAD file and it was like a two-button software. So you clicked on a button, imported a step file and you had been able to look at it using a HTC Vive headset we received as a very early system integrator in 2016. So we got one of the very first HTC Vive headsets and made a piece of software and started selling it.

Markus Rimmele:

And that went then off like a rocket on the Hannover Fair? Or was it like yeah, these guys developed something cool, but we haven't figured out a use case in how to use that piece of software or app, which is always a challenge when you develop something new, you have to be in the right timeline so that the users find the needs and the pricing needs to be correct. As you mentioned, the previous software for $100,000 and more a license got never sold. My understanding is that you also changed the pricing and made it into a subscription, which then also lowers the barrier of entry, right?

Julian Hermle:

Actually, we received that HTC headset in 2016, like three days in advance of the exhibition, and we said like, let's just take it. We were like one or maybe one of two who had such a headset on that exhibition. And that was really crazy because we just like put together a very brief demo in Unity. There was like kind of a robot and you were able to like grab it and move it and well, that really took off like a rocket because hundreds of people were like standing around our booth, which was just like nine square meters. Like crazy much people wanted just to try out that new technology because no one ever saw it and it was kind of a very big hype, but it not like convert in, uh in in business, you know like. But actually we did like a one contact was made there with dmg dmg mori, which is like that machinery producing company, and there's some guy stopped by and said like this is really interesting. And we said like, yeah, we're trying to I that idea of CMC if you are already there. And we did like some tests and like first prototypes and I told them like we're going to make a software where you can visualize your CAD data very easy and like look into it in terms of virtual prototyping, because this is where we started. So the virtual engineering aspect was like the first use case we brought into the market. These guys said like, hey, let's stay in contact, let us know when you have something ready and we're just going to look into it. And actually these guys had been our first customers and we are still in a really good customer contract with them Since then, like we have, we work now on many locations with them. With them since then, like we have, we work now on many locations with them.

Julian Hermle:

The like second interaction or second company was leap hell, which was, uh, like the excavators of leaper. Leaper also said like that's quite interesting, and they like developed a new model and they wanted to have it. And they kind of like co-developed with us a bit functionalities and so this is how it started off. But it was not, like you know, selling off the shelf, like you want five, you want one. So the technology was extremely new and hyped. We had that kind of like gaming tech still on us. So these old and conservative engineering managers, they said like that's a play, this is nothing serious. And so we back then we have been working like very hard to, let's say, bring the technology at all into the market, because we were not only selling our product. We have been selling the concept of how to visualize your prototypes and not building them up in like wood or metal or foam or whatever you have which is still made. Millions of dollars are still spent on physical prototypes, where you can save with a virtual prototype, for example.

Markus Rimmele:

And so, to sum it up, your product CMC viewer. How would you describe it in two sentences?

Julian Hermle:

I hope I can translate it from German, because we have that slogan and so we say like we are doing digital product to touch, that's like the slogan we have. And we are working in the 3D product visualization of machinery and plant engineering. That's our slogan we are working for.

Markus Rimmele:

And to kind of translate it. So the income data or is a CAD file in any format in 3D? Of course, any type of 3D CAD file. Of course any type of 3D CAD file. And you take that onto your platform to then visualize it in 3D SolidWorks, you name it, even if you plan something in 3D there, you, when you are in virtual reality, you have really that feeling of the room and the depth and it feels like you are in that world that's it.

Julian Hermle:

So the main factor of our solution is that if you are a designer or engineer at a company, you by yourself you are very much into your product and you know, like how big is it and you really understand it because that's your like daily business. I mean, the more complex it gets, the more hard it gets for like individual to keep track on everything. But usually the designers themselves, they do not have that much need for this kind of visualization. It comes to a big point when it comes to any decisions of stakeholders, because when looking into a product development nowadays, you not only have the designers which are like designing the product and then give it to manufacturing. You have actually manufacturing who has to build it. You have after sales and services who have to take care of the maintenance of these topics. You have actually the operators who have to like to be trained or whatever. You have managers which have to make the decision, which have to like to be trained or whatever. You have managers which have to make the decision, which have to understand. You have purchasing department, quality assurance, you have like security topics. So you have like this very large group of stakeholders and all of them only have like a small percentage of that like spatial understanding the designer has. So there have been very absurd situations we stepped into where managers have been entering the room seeing a prototype for the first time and just turning around and saying, are you guys crazy? I wanted a compact design and this is now room filling. So these are the topics we are working in creating a base for decisions for any kind of stakeholders which are not into 3D every day. The base concept of like virtual reality is to make it as real as possible so that you are recognizing a situation, a product, whatever, a room concept or whatever, as fast as possible as you would do it in reality.

Julian Hermle:

So we had situations where people were putting up the glasses, looking at their design, even the designers. So also there are benefits. Definitely they were very skeptic in the beginning. They said I don't have any need for this and then, like they were going into the vr model and spent there almost an hour and like making topic lists of like I saw this. I saw that this is not possible. We we cannot do it like this because we would not be able to reach it. Or a chip movement, for example in CNC machines. They just like stick in their head and they immediately see where this kind of like chip pillars are going to happen. Yeah, they said like this cannot be like this cannot stay like that. So they took guys from the workshop, very experienced technicians, put on the glasses and these technicians, they like, immediately tell you 10 topics to change, which is very expensive if you do that on a prototype which is already built up.

Markus Rimmele:

I agree on that and I saw that with other VR applications as well, as the big benefit of VR is that you can simulate things in a in a 3d world and and test it out before it gets hammered in stone and therefore eliminate a lot of problems and issues beforehand. And at the example what you just brought, you can actually bring the operators, the users, the people working with that stuff in as an expert and in virtual reality without any training in how to use it. They see it and they can share their immediate feedback on what you present to them, and that's a great tool to get the feedback and to improve and to optimize it and plan it better. I would sum it up like that that's it.

Julian Hermle:

That's it Like better products, faster decisions, higher quality. That's what you achieve. So we really have the numbers by our customers which are telling us we wouldn't have been that fast if we would have not used your technology. I had a customer from the excavator industry. He told us like they released just the first product which was like completely I say completely, I mean it's not only VR, of course, it's a lot of other tools they are using, but completely designed with the use of VR, the support of VR. And they told us that the prototype manufacturers came up to the designers and engineers and asked, like guys, what did you change? What did you do different? This time? Because, like, almost everything fit. That was really a surprise where they said, like they almost haven't had any like retrofitting or changes on the prototype. They made a very high quality prototype which directly was used as the base for a zero production prototype.

Markus Rimmele:

That's pretty impressive. So the first use case, or one use case of VR is the support in the whole process of prototyping. The other use case is, to my understanding, also in sales and marketing, in presenting actually a complex product to the public, to a potential buyer, to a potential client, with the advantage that with 3D you can showcase way better and more efficient the complexity of that product, versus going the good old way by having a paper brochure with a picture of that product and a lot of technical text to it which then the other side may not understand Absolutely.

Julian Hermle:

So where we're actually coming from is engineering. This is like that was our founding and the easy way of like create this kind of visualization by one click. But in fact, in marketing and sales like when explaining it to potential customers or customers, your product you actually don't do anything different than in engineering. So you want your opposite to understand a complex setup or a complex design of a product. You have like different stakeholders here, but actually the core is the same. I want to show you how the product will work or is working or how something and of course I have plenty of limitations in doing that. The bigger it gets or the more dangerous it gets, or the more variations we get. So we have these like kind of super mega trends of individualization. And this also is seen in the industry. You have like machine manufacturers creating like the total number of one, of exact one machine configuration. And how would you like to deal with that on a trade show, on an exhibition, where you have customers coming in and they want to see like exact these different configurations for their application. And that's actually the topic we have been recognizing pretty fast. I mean, the VR people always have been like kind of rock stars within the companies because they're still like dealing with these, like fancy headsets and 3D stuff, and people are very much into this technology, no matter of where they are from, from what department or whatever. So what they started pretty early is grabbing these tools and grabbing this technology and bringing it to their trade shows and exhibitions. Because they were I mean, in 2017, 2018, almost every booth on every industry trade show had a VR headset. You were just like walking through there and, even if it makes sense or not, they had a VR headset because it was a trend.

Julian Hermle:

We started to create these kind of virtual showroom functionalities in our software, where it's not only about importing a CAD file and look at it, but preparing a functioning product, a animated product, a high resolution rendering of the product, so that you I mean in marketing and sales, there has to be bling, bling, it has to like, look good and you know polish metal and whatever, like the colors and everything. So they want to shine and they want to shine with their products and show it to their customers. And so we developed this kind of second use case, almost parallel, and we got a little bit away from the plain VR use case, because when dealing in marketing and sales, you are always confronted with a kind of groups of people you not only want to have, like one person in the VR headset and whoever experienced that. It's cool for the individual which is wearing the glasses, but all the others around it's like very boring because they just see the person behaving strange but not really seeing what this person is experiencing. So we started pretty early to use these kind of, let's say so.

Julian Hermle:

We started pretty early to use these kind of, let's say, 3d projections, holograms, three-sided experience centers, for example, touch displays, ar technology, xr, extended reality devices. So what we made is like our product as it was made with Unity, and Unity has all these like wonderful APIs to any kind of hardware which is coming out on the market. We were able to make an adaption very fast and easy to bring our solution to any kind of hardware device. So we offer to our customers to use VR also with a, for example, 3d projection wall.

Markus Rimmele:

example 3D projection wall. And let me showcase presentation screen here and maybe you can talk about that and explain what we're seeing here and go a little bit deeper into that.

Julian Hermle:

Yeah, so I mean, the center of all of our solutions is always the 3D model of the product.

Julian Hermle:

In this case, here you see a CNC milling machine which is always the center, and, of course, as you're getting digital more and more, you still have to have some piece of metal on your exhibition booth.

Julian Hermle:

It has to be there, it's no doubt. If you're producing this kind of technology, you bring that with you. But what we tell them is extend, extended with digital solutions, so you show your flagship product in reality and all the variants of it you can show in 3D, for example. And so what is really a big business of us is bringing our LED power wall. You see it here on the back left, which is a very large LED screen which can be extended in different sizes, and you can stand there with a group of people and they all see exactly the same. That's one very important thing that a person who is presenting wants to show something to a group of people, and if even that group of people is wearing VR glasses, it would not be possible to point their views to exactly that specific topic you would like to showcase to them. So this LED Powerwall is helping a lot, highlighting your USPs.

Markus Rimmele:

And I agree on that and I had the opportunity to see it actually on a trade show where a machine builder of complex medical device process machinery was showcasing their machine on the LED power wall and a group of people standing there and flying through that machinery and get the explanation of what that machinery does and where the value in their particular product is. And it was just a mind blowing visual experience that you have the 3D feeling when you stand in front of this screen wearing kind of like it's not VR glasses I would compare it. It's kind of a similar feeling that the glasses you wear at the 3D movie theater or something like that, so they kind of feel more like regular glasses, not like the big chunky VR glass, and that's quite an experience.

Julian Hermle:

Absolutely. I mean, this is really a topic. Even after all that time, if you have people the first time looking at it, it still has a wow effect and usually like the LED Powerwall or 3D showroom or showroom of the future however you want to call it is always a highlight. No matter on, like, how large the booth is, you always have lots of people there and all I mean the sales guys. Guys, they love it because they go there and they like show something exciting to their customers and they are showing something they usually would not be able to show either. It's like a hazardous environment, for example. Yeah, so like when work, as you said, medical technologies filling any kind of substances, it's always hard to really go in there and show the process because it would harm the people. So here you can very safe and briefly showcase what your machine is doing and where the benefits of your product are the benefits of your product are yeah.

Markus Rimmele:

plus, you have the option to showcase an entire product portfolio of your different machines stations on a trade show, versus if you bring the physical machines in. You're limited in the space. But it's also a super big cost of bringing machines on a trade show, set them up, commission them, let them run and then, after that week of trade show, disassemble it and ship it back home.

Julian Hermle:

Absolutely. It's crazy expensive to bring it over and when it comes to oversee exhibitions, every, every producer has the problem to to finish the machine he wants to showcase because it has to go on the ship, so it has to be like ready, let's say, eight weeks in advance, and usually it's not.

Markus Rimmele:

Yeah, the whole timing comes onto it as well. You have to be at the right location at the right time and if you miss any slot, you have your trade show and your machine is not here or any important part is missing, and then you cannot showcase the whole thing and everything was for nothing, what you invested in. That's again the trinity of having it in a digital form, because if it works, it works and you can showcase your entire product portfolio in all different variations, and I assume you even can do custom arrangements on site and do kind of like special projections if you want to.

Julian Hermle:

Absolutely. I mean all that. Integration topics, I mean automation, is getting more and more important. So it's not only the product itself, all the integrations from any kind of, let's say, loading or unloading or logistics or whatever, space consumption.

Julian Hermle:

All these kinds of things are becoming very important to our customers and they hardly do not have any chance to show it except of, let's say, videos or 3D animations, which are just fakes in the viewpoints, and we always hear from our customers that running an animation is okay, but they always have to pause it, they always have to jump back and forth because they want to explain individual topics to customers. And so you are actually spending your time scrolling in your video player instead of like staying there at the product explaining what you want to explain. And you know, start animations by trigger buttons. You click on something, it opens up, you pull out things, you make a intersection, you show in detail your technology, your USPs and your customer will go off the booth and understand your product much better than he would do when looking at a brochure or at a video, for example.

Markus Rimmele:

Explain to us the other hardware visualization options showcasing here in this slide. So we talked about the 3D wall. What's the difference, for example, to the Experience Center, and what is the touch table?

Julian Hermle:

Touch- table yeah, that's the only German word in there. So the Experience Center actually is also kind of a LED wall, but it has three sides and it immerses you, a group of people very good, so you dive into an environment, you look left, right, top down, whatever, so it's actually kind of an experience. Movie theater.

Markus Rimmele:

It's even a more immersive feeling than the LED wall.

Julian Hermle:

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I would say. I would say I mean, you can also have it in 3D, but you can also have it just in 2D and it gives you a very good spatial understanding of where you are.

Markus Rimmele:

Because it has also the projections on the sidewall, on the sides.

Julian Hermle:

Yeah, so that's like kind of a very yeah, I would say cool highlight on your booth.

Julian Hermle:

It is mainly used for, you know, doing shows in a fixed time grid, so you like every half an hour you get into a show and you like showcasing, for example, your company or portfolio, something like that.

Julian Hermle:

I said the sales guys love our technology. They always wanted the Powerwall to come with them to the customers, and that's actually what we do there in smaller devices, so you can have the same content we, or the customers, are creating for our tools. You bring the same content on smaller devices, like a normal touch table, for example. So it's a touch display display, let's say, of 75 inch or 65 inches or something like that, and it's a very compact possibility to bring that simulation with you on a exhibition. So even if you have a very small booth, you can use the touch table to bring that interactive experience to your customers. And so the same is the point of sales, where we allow the sales guys and marketing people to bring the simulations and visualizations on tablets, on mobile devices like smartphones, for example, their laptops, for example. So they are using the same piece of software on all these kinds of hardware devices.

Markus Rimmele:

So the magic of your solution using the same piece of software on all these kind of hardware devices so the magic of your solution is that you have the CMC viewer application where, again, as an input file, the CAD file comes in and then you have the different outputs and visualization which, on one side, can be your virtual reality glass, like a meta quest or something like that, but it can also be that 3D LED wall, it can be the experience center, it can be the touch table, it can run as an application on your laptop, your tablet or your phone, but it uses all the same data and the data generation or the purification of the CAD data has been done only once and not, like on other applications, for every channel. You have to do it again and again and again. That's it.

Julian Hermle:

That's the power. Yeah, that that's it. That's the power. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. That's the power of Unity. So Unity 3D is helping us doing this and you are able to use it on any device you would like to, very easily. And data preparation is either done by specialists like us or by our customers on their own specialists like us, or by the by our customers on their own, because we have that editor where you can import and where you can like, assign materials, create scenes, whatever and and as you mentioned, you can use it at the point of sales as well.

Markus Rimmele:

It's not just a solution for that trade show which happens maybe once or or twice in a year, with the point of sales solutions on the hardware device of the sales person laptop, tablet and so on. They can use this throughout the year when they visit clients and showcase that right there as well. So you can use it the entire time and not just for a trade show.

Julian Hermle:

In an ideal world I would love to live in it. A manufacturer is having a single source of 3D data, so the data he is designing its product should be automated, or should be in an automated process where this kind of presentations are just like automatically built out of because the information is there in the manufacturing process. They exactly know what color would be applied to which part. Everything is there because they build the product layer, the or, let's say, the challenge we have is to bring that into design process, line it up with all the stakeholders, because marketing and sales is not very important to the designer at the beginning. It's just like they coming afterwards, they have to take what I left over words, because if you have your processes streamlined like that, it would be very easy to make use of it in any use case you can imagine how far are we away from this perfect world well, some are already doing it in certain ways.

Julian Hermle:

I almost haven't seen a customer, a company doing it like a hundred percent, but some are already getting there because the understanding is getting better. For that topic, but I think it's still a far way to go because the design and engineering departments they have a lot of power within these companies. It's hard to convince someone to do it in a different way, as he did it like 20 years.

Markus Rimmele:

Which is the general challenge in digital transformation, as digital transformation is not just doing something in a digital way and a lot of people think digital transformation is always an engineering or an IT topic but it affects actually everyone in an organization, in a company, and, at the end of the day, you have to do things in a new, different way, which are then hopefully better, more efficient and maybe or hopefully, adding more value to your client or your internal client. That's what digital transformation is all about it's getting better, in my point of view. How do you see that, julian?

Julian Hermle:

It is definitely. I mean there is lots of activities going on. I still miss a little bit the support of the upper management because usually they support these kind of activities with on. I still miss a little bit the support of the upper management because usually they support these kind of activities with money. So they fund it and say like here you have a few grand to try out things. But in lots of cases they do not think of like what if this proof of concept or pilot project is like successful, how are we going to proceed? So this kind of proof of concept phase is always is like successful, how are we going to proceed? So this kind of proof of concept phase is always kind of good. Usually. I mean it's even good to understand okay, this is not working, I don't have a use case here. This is also totally fine, because it's better for you to know that something, something does not fit as like not knowing anything about it. Yeah so, but it usually you have. There are lots of benefits out of these concept studies, but they're not thinking of like how can I make use of that, how can I transform it into a business model, for example, and what is necessary to do so Because don't have people sitting in these companies waiting for work.

Julian Hermle:

Everyone is busy. No one has capacity like take over that kind of like a digitized job. Yeah, because they are very busy in there and where it's working really good, you have really good people going that extra mile because they are like very passionate about it. They stay that like one or two hours longer to try out things, new things. But in the main cases it's like they do it on their, let's say, private budget.

Julian Hermle:

It's just something they are interested in and the managers don't see that they have to invest also in resources, not only monetary budget. They have to put people there and they have to put out time for this. And especially in small and medium-sized companies, you don't have these kind of development departments, for example, where you have like that extra time. You know where you like have these scientists running around, like in Google, for example, where they can try out and do whatever they want. So usually you don't have that in the smaller companies and that's a big problem because they have the use cases but not the resources for it, and that's a big change resources for it and that's a big change.

Markus Rimmele:

I see that, overall, in implementing digitalization in an organization, in small, medium enterprises, as there's always that the people challenge, there's not enough people or extra time to do it, as everybody is busy with their day-to-day job and, from a leadership standpoint, the opportunities of digitalization also in terms of new business models, for example are often not seen. That's the reason why we're doing this podcast and actually talk about these topics, to kind of spread the word and educate people. What is all possible in the year now, 2024. And if we do another talk, let's say next year or in two years, things have already further developed and new things are possible. Let's let's jump really quick into the future, specifically on everything under immersive technology ar, vr and so on. Where does the the path go and and what future trends do you see there?

Julian Hermle:

well. I mean, hardware development is crazy. When it comes to, like, new devices. There are big leaps. They're still like that trend going on.

Julian Hermle:

If you ever had the chance to wear a apple vision pro, it's a it's a crazy good device. The big problem apple is having with that device is it's very expensive, so it will not get into the mass. So their meta is doing a really good job with the meta headsets. Our customers and, like everywhere, people like it very much because it's a few hundred bucks and a really good solution. We just had, I think yesterday or day before, snapchat glasses coming out with two snapdragon processors, which is also like. They almost look like the 3D glasses we are using for our power wall. So these devices are getting very handy, but still you don't have it in the mass. That's the problem. So you don't have these devices available everywhere and this is still like a big hurdle, I would say.

Julian Hermle:

So the big change will happen as we have this kind of technology integrated in everyday stuff, like our glasses, for example, or you just have it like a smartphone. You know, like with your smartphone you can do 3d and everything, and then it will be there and available. But I think we're going there. That's the point I mean. If you speak of the industrial metaverse, for example, which is actually like that 3D world, or only the metaverse, it's a definition, it's hard, but it's there. What is the metaverse? Yeah, so if you compare it to the Internet, so everyone is accessing the Internet by his everyday devices, like a computer, a laptop, a smartphone, like a computer, a laptop, a smartphone. And we will be at the point of, let's say, a metaverse or industrial metaverse, if everyone in the world and I speak of like all, like 7 billion people, let's say 80% of them have access to devices which are capable of that technology. And there I think it's still lots of years in between until we get there, but we are making it.

Markus Rimmele:

Do you see any conjunction of technology, immersive, combining the power and the magic of AI or IoT and kind of get there into, let's say, digital twinning?

Julian Hermle:

Definitely. I mean we're working on plenty of AI projects within CMC, especially of, for example, creating synthetic data for AI learning. So you know, like using physical systems, physical environments, so that AI agents or ML agents are able to learn, to try out. So there is. I would say the 3D world is crucial for that, because you have to have a playground and you don't have realistic data and, let's say, 90% of the use case, you don't have realistic data to train it. So you need the synthetic data out of the 3D world. And I mean, of course, when it comes to rendering performance, the AI has lots of potential. So even if you think of, you know, like upscaling of images, reducing the amount of processing power you need, and, of course, I think we're doing a big step towards AI generated 3D worlds, where not an towards AI-generated 3D worlds where not a 3D artist or an engineer has to sit in front of a 3D model preparing steps he did 100 times before. All these repetitive tasks will be taken over by artificial intelligence.

Markus Rimmele:

Very cool.

Julian Hermle:

So, to sum it up, where do you see CMC in the future? We want to be the partner of the small and medium-sized companies in the German-speaking area. Machinery and plant engineering is a very big industry here and we really would love to be the, let's say, 3d and real-time visualization simulation partner here. And we see us as a partner of Unity 3D because we believe in the technology itself. Maybe it's becoming some someday uh open source. We do not know. There's uh up and ups and downs, but um yeah, we're looking forward to it.

Markus Rimmele:

3d will be everywhere I agree on that, and we in at digitalitum believe in 3d as well. That that's why CMC is a partner of us. If you want to demo their VR software, we are happy to do so. Julian, thanks for being in the Digitalitum podcast and sharing your insights about 3D and virtual reality.

Julian Hermle:

Thank you very much, markus, it was a pleasure.

People on this episode

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Markus Rimmele

Host
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Julian Hermle

Guest