Our aim, within this blog series, is to demonstrate how recent and continuing changes in technology and business practices are reinforcing one another, and creating disruption and opportunities at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before.
If I were a more capable communicator, you’d be looking at an image, not lines of text. As a species, images resonate strongly with us and, as the old saying goes, pictures and diagrams really do ‘speak a thousand words’. The problem is that they can be difficult to construct accurately. Furthermore, until very recently, our ability to have a fully 360 degree view of some real world artefact meant creating complicated isometric projections, or multiple drawings of the same object from different aspects. In each case, the workload went up, as did the cognitive load placed on those who must interpret these drawings.
Computers have done more than just make it quicker to churn out more images: they’ve created an entirely new means of communication. Virtalis has been pioneering visualisation for industrial applications for three decades, and from our perspective, the importance of placing this approach at the heart of all operations is only increasing.
This is creating an environment unforgiving to those who are unable to make big decisions early, involve multiple stakeholders across the entire product life-cycle or push complex and detailed information quickly and effectively around and beyond the organisation.
Industry is awash with an alphabet soup of software platforms, which are essential custodians of data and documentation, but concern is growing that the trend is more about archiving than empowering your business or underpinning new routes to market.
It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that we have a strong opinion on this here at Virtalis. A vision of how things can work, based on what we know to be effective from our experience to date, and our understanding of what connectivity and digitisation can deliver.
But, to begin with, we need to talk about the penny farthing…