JR Central teamed up with Israel startup, Resonai, for their first collaboration with startups to explore new seeds for the future innovation
Central Japan Railway Company (hereinafter referred to as “JR Central”) established the Innovation Promotion Office in July 2020. As their first case study of co-creation with international startups, JR Central set up an explanatory tour of rolling stock (railway vehicles) by using AR technology and an activity corner using VR technology at the SCMaglev and Railway Park in March 2021 for a limited time. As one of the collaborated startups, Resonai, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “Resonai” ), a startup headquartered in Israel, provided AR platform service for the Explainer Tour of Railway Cars. This interview will cover the details of their PoC (Proof of Concept) and their future prospects.
— Could you tell us about what inspired you to collaborate with Resonai?
Teruaki:
The Innovation Promotion Office was established in July 2020 with the mission “Explore technological seeds for the next few decades after the Linear Central Shinkansen.”
We have had relationships with major companies, but we thought that it is necessary to collaborate with startups in order to make a small start while considering a long-term vision to achieve our goal. Through discussions with various companies, we found the potential in digital twins and point cloud data, so we decided to launch a PoC project utilizing them at the SCMaglev and Railway Park as the first trial.
On the other hand, we didn’t have much experience in collaborating with startups. We honestly had no clue about how to approach them, but fortunately we met Mr. Ehara, Director of Plug and Play Japan’s Mobility vertical, at a seminar and started having discussions with him.
After several meetings, we set a goal to conduct a hands-on experience session in early March 2021 for customers and some of our board members. Through the startup sourcing by Plug and Play Japan, we met Resonai and got attracted to their technology that can provide AR navigations while processing heavy point cloud data in real-time, which made us decide to tackle this project together with them.
— What was the digital twin technology offered by Resonai?
Emil:
Digital twin is a technology that reproduces information in real space into virtual space by utilizing IoT and other technologies.
Resonai specializes in “computer vision technology”, which enables computers to realize the same world as human visual information by processing image data.
Our strength is AI that enables context analysis, and 3D and point cloud data to recognize context, situation, and object that users are surrounded in, which allow us to provide high value-added and personalized content with each user.
With AI technology and real-time data processing,”Vera”, an enterprise AR platform, can recreate buildings as smart digital twins, creating an environment where people and devices can be smoothly connected.
Through the app with context-aware computing, it is possible to streamline the operational management of office buildings, retail and healthcare facilities, as well as provide AR navigation and information tailored to each user’s situation.
Just to illustrate some of the examples, in the level of retail or commercial activity, applications such as digital concierge guide users to their destinations through AR navigation with their mobile devices, and in the course of navigation, they can obtain real-time updated data associated with the surrounding environment.
Japan is known for investing a lot in the ability to incorporate autonomous agents, robotics, and relevant technology into the interiors to reduce the friction between human behavior and interaction within those facilities.
Furthermore, the spread of the new coronavirus has definitely increased the need for digitalization and automation, and autonomous agents that assist people in their interactions with facilities such as stations, trains, and airports.
Given this situation, we are confident that our AR platform can provide value in the Japanese market.
— When did you start thinking about expandingJapanese market?
Emil:
When we founded our company in 2014, we heavily invested in developing the mathematical algorithms that are needed to deal with this new type of data, 3D point-cloud, vendoring 3D data in real time. So developing this grass-root technology, proprietary technology of our company took us almost 2 and a half years. Only then, we entered the capabilities of working at the level of big infrastructures and complex environments both in the level of scale and size, such as airports or hospitals.
Since then, we have increased the precision of our development by adding the ability to index to enable real-time interactions with the mobile phone users in a very accurate manner such as location data and their interactions with mobile cameras. Once we had Vera capable with the ability to onboard those types of real estate as a platform, Japan definitely became a very relevant market to us.
Shai:
For us, entering into the Japanese market was important because our technology is something that very much fits the culture and requirements perceived in Japan.
Plug and Play Japan was very supportive through introducing us to great customers, helping us setting meetings, and such.
Specifically in this project, we were not able to fly out anywhere with coronavirus restrictions, so we really appreciate that Plug and Play Japan bridged between us and JR Central to support communication, onsite-testings, and technical aspects that came up during the projects.
— For JR Central, what kind of challenges did you face during the project and how did you overcome them?
Teruaki:
Before our meeting, Plug and Play Japan provided Resonai with information about the Japanese business culture, which made the communication process very flexible and stress-free.
On the other hand, it took more than twice as much time as usual to arrange contracts and hold meetings through interpreting in a limited amount of time. It made us realize the importance of having some buffer time to proceed with the project.
It was also difficult to keep up with the speed of collaboration with external parties while we kept internal procedures running smoothly.
As a major company, it takes a certain amount of time and needs to follow a set of steps to make each decision, arrange with related departments, and deal with a NDA and partnership contract. Since the authorizers are also very occupied, it is necessary to consider the lead time for all arrangements to obtain approval, so we had to devise a way to speed up the process.
— Where was the target value set to verify the effect?
Teruaki:
Since we have very little experience in collaborating with a startup or an accelerator, we considered the collaboration with Plug and Play Japan and the experience of this demonstration experiment within our company as one of our achievements.
We feel that it was very effective and valuable as our first step of open innovation to conduct the PoC with Resonai without any delay.
When we launched the Innovation Promotion Office, we envisioned that we would try to start small with startups. As a result of this project, we now actually receive requests from our company and group companies, so we feel that we will be ready to need to w start a collaboration based on their needs and requests in the near future.
Since there have been almost no cases of open innovation or collaboration with startups, we believe that it is our mission to bring in a new perspective through our activities. I hope that through opportunities like this, open innovation activities will gradually spread throughout the company.
— For Resonai, were there any challenges you have faced in the process of the project?
Emil：
Based on our experience of working with Japanese companies for nearly 18 years before founding Resonai, there are things that we can see across, in terms of difficulties on the objective level.
The language is often a barrier, especially when you want to discuss technical aspects and you want to be very accurate on how things are perceived, and what kind of actions are needed.
In addition to language barriers, different cultures have different definitions of “accurate”. Under such circumstances, it takes a certain amount of time to understand detailed and accurate information about technology.
With Plug and Play Japan’s support, we were able to reduce the communication gap, deepen mutual understanding, smoothly share abstract ideas, enable discussions at a high level, and efficiently carry out the project.
Shai：
We had a lot of challenges related to not being able to physically come and meet the users and do all of the things that we usually do due to the coronavirus. That being said, our platform that we built for that deploy and manage for user experiences across the world.
Once it was a good experience to have within a span of a couple of weeks, or a month, about the definition of user experience and JR Central envisioned it to the actual deployment onsite. At this special event, we participated and were able to show hundreds of users the application and it was also great for us in terms of working with JR Central, everything is data driven, so we got a lot of feedback, user questionnaires and everything was really thought out within the project.
We had difficulty holding meetings with all project members due to the time difference, but both JR Central and Plug and Play Japan teams were flexible and held weekly meetings so that everyone could be on the same page and we were able to overcome the language barrier and time lag problem.
— Do you have any specific tips to overcome the language barrier and communicate with Japanese companies smoothly?
Shai：
Something that was very useful in working with Japanese companies was the importance of having visual aids and preparing presentation materials, even if they are very rough. I had tens of presentations prepared internally and externally, to convey “This is what we think the user will see, and it will look like that at this point.”
It started at wireframes, then we made it into a more designed UI, but to understand the architecture and user experiences, it was very helpful to have the visual leterations, and as a business, we had this advantages as a very visual company, the ability to talk about what the user would eventually see and it’s not something on an architectural level but it’s visual and almost tactile to talk about the user experience. These were very helpful for me in this project.
Emil：
Sometimes entrepreneurs and technology developers fall in love with complexity.
Even if the ideas are very complex by nature, it is your responsibility as a startup or company to reduce those complex ideas into something that every stakeholder can respect and assimilate with business. This is something that I cannot stress enough the importance of, and it’s a learning process. We are constantly learning how to reduce complexity into a very simple message, like “what I will get out of it,” “how people, visitors, and consumers will enjoy this,” “how they are going to enjoy those applications on top of Vera.”
— What is your vision for the future?
Teruaki:
As I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, our mission is to “Explore technological seeds for the next few decades after the Linear Central Shinkansen”, and through our activities, we aim to revitalize and promote understanding of open innovation activities. This PoC has been conducted in a mindset “Let’s try it, be bold” which is also the motto of the Innovation Promotion Office. Since we feel that there is enough potential to expand new initiatives through collaboration with startups, we would like to pick up the needs within our company and support the collaboration between startups and other business units up to a certain stage, while promoting the initiatives as a driving force.
In this way, I hope to help foster awareness of open development methods, internal business reform, and revitalization.
On the other hand, I think that it isn’t necessary for the entire company to take challenges for innovation, nor should it be. As one of the leading companies for transportation infrastructure in Japan, safety and stabilization is top one priority of our railroad business, which is one of our core businesses, so it is important that we proceed with our work carefully so as not to damage the trust and credibility of our customers. On the other hand, we believe that we need to continue to challenge ourselves and adopt new technologies in order to improve our services and increase the efficiency of our operations.
Through this PoC, we believe it is important for people to experience and feel new technologies and applications, not only through documents, but also within real experience, so that they can feel and learn something from it. For this purpose, we would like to continue our activities in a short cycle.
Emil：
For us, the healthcare and transportation verticals are important areas where we can provide high value with Vera in terms of reducing friction in all levels of transportation, trains, airports, and other facilities that cover huge amounts of people entering and you need to monitor in a very efficient way.
On top of that, we also expect that in the future, Vera will be implemented in more facilities and office buildings across its cycles of buildings from design to construction, later on into maintenance and operation phase. It’s extremely important for us to have as much real estate.
When new hardware such as smart glasses and head devices, which are gradually entering the market, become more widely available, it will be more common to install such devices in facilities or into apps. . Currently, various major companies are focusing on indexing information and creating content to be embedded in the augmented space on the hardware side, but in order to do so, a platform is required.
Once you incorporate Vera, you can build that application that can be distributed and published to every hardware device, and people will still maintain this ability to synchronize and to consume the same information spontaneously, seamlessly, as the publisher intended.
It is only when people are in the same reality that they can interact with the same stories and contexts, and create new things from the conversations and discussions that arise.
Moving to an age where anything is possible, when we have infinite realities embedded in a single physical reality, you still have to maintain this. This is why Vera is crucial, to transform any real estate owner and operator into a digital publisher that can enjoy this infinite real estate maintained by reality and publishing responsibility. So this is where we want to be in with Resonai, in order to define a standard in publishing, in the age of AR and this infinite amount of information that we are now going to enter.
