Terminology, the Content Bottleneck, and Interdisciplinary Collaboration at the Digility AR/VR Conference

Tracy Rolling
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

In July I attended Digility, a fairly young European-focused conference about B2B Mixed Reality. There were over 70 talks on multiple stages so I definitely did not see everything, but from what I was able to take in there was a nicely-balanced mix of corporate speakers, academics, start ups, and technologists. A lot of tech conferences run a bit thin on the academic and research side. This is a real shame. Corporate and start-up speakers can have a lot of trouble looking at technology from a critical perspective. Thoughtless optimism is a professional illness in technology and we need some people around to make us put down the pom poms for five minutes and think about the sociological implications of all the cool stuff we’re dreaming about.

Digility also did an amazing job of giving us gender parity on stage. I wish I could say that this isn’t a big surprise anymore, but what a pleasant big surprise.

One of the most entertaining threads across the talks was the search for what the heck to call this technology. Nobody seems to like the dichotomous AR/VR terminology. Mixed Reality is a fairly popular term. Jens Angerer used the term Extended Reality — abbreviated xR. The “x” could also be thought of as “variable” reality. Nerdy, but kind of cute. Jay Donovan proposed ARMR, pronounced “armor.” I find this one weirdly barbaric and pop at the same time, and I don’t plan to use it. Ever.

If we can’t agree what to call the industry, we can at least all agree that we have a serious content problem. Some variation of the theme “content is the bottleneck” was sung like a refrain. There are a lot of reasons for the content desert. We have the classic problem that there are no consumers because there’s no content because there are no consumers. But the fundamental underlying causes of the content problem are also linked to a dearth of day-to-day use cases that make sense with the technology in its current state and at its current price. Anybody who gets on stage and says that VR is mature for teleconferencing has clearly not been on a corporate Skype call in the past two years.

One of the interesting projects tackling the content problem was presented by Kerim Ispir. His company Re’Flekt has a platform that takes the CAD and technical files that industrial partners already have in their systems and puts them into a tablet-friendly AR product. No need to create new content or build a custom app. You can plug in what you already have. This approach is also interesting because people aren’t yet very well educated about the technology. Having some high-value low-cost uses goes a long way to helping mixed reality make its way into the mind space of the general public. *Cough* Pokémon Go *cough*.

The last major recurring theme of this year’s conference was the need for interdisciplinary collaboration. This topic gets attention in every emerging tech conference. At Digility, this conversation was mostly about tech people collaborating more closely with industry people to figure out how to build something that makes sense. Nils Hasler, whose work intersects imaging and medicine showed a great example of a motion capture solution from The Captuary that is designed to show how a person is using her skeleton in real time without needing one of those embarrassing ping-pong-ball catsuits.

Unfortunately, I do get the feeling that some of the talk about the content bottleneck and interdisciplinary collaboration is some kind of secret code for technologists to say “Hey, we built this really cool thing. Our part of this work is, like, totally ready. Now we need all you designers and so-called creative people to do something with it.” That ain’t collaboration.

I had some great conversations at Digility, which for me is the most valuable thing I can get from a conference of any kind. A couple of the topics I discussed with people during the conference are things I am still thinking and talking about a month later. These ideas deserve their own articles, so if you’re curious, keep following and I’ll have something new in a week or two.