Enlightened Industry: Building the future of industry with CSIRO

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The PHORIA Project

6 min readApr 1, 2019

This is 2050 — the world of the future. There are 9.8 billion people alive on the planet and global warming is in full swing. Every day you wake up to a new headline:

Hundreds of Millions Malnourished as CO2 Levels Rise

Crops Fail as Chemical Waste Degrades Soil

Water Shortages Devastate Agricultural Ecosystems

Global Food Insecurity Reaches Crisis Level

What do you do? By this time your choices are limited and the chance to minimise the negative impact of human activity has come and gone.

Even now in 2019, that chance feels out of reach. Climate scientists predict that the world will be 2 degrees warmer by 2050 and minor adjustments to daily life won’t be enough to avert a widespread natural disaster.

But it’s not a reason to give up. The more we know about the global challenges we will face over the next 30 years, the greater the opportunity to solve them.

What we need is a complete overhaul of the way we understand and act upon our relationship to the environment. CSIRO knows this, and that’s why they’re working to find solutions before these global challenges truly take hold.

The research underway at CSIRO is groundbreaking and will shape the future of industries. But if this research is going to be the driving force behind widespread behavioural changes at all levels of industry, from CEOs to workers on the ground, it needs to be communicated in an accessible way.

CSIRO’s Active Integrated Matter (AIM) team brought PHORIA onboard to create a novel, intuitive and engaging way to relay their incredible research to the universe. And there’s no better way for us to convey their vision that through XR.

Our team of talented developers combined 3D assets and beautifully designed animations to craft a narrative around CSIRO’s vision: Enlightened Industry.

We used our unique insight into creative technology and spatial computing to build this dynamic and interactive experience for Magic Leap. Although this was a difficult task to undertake, we believe that Magic Leap is the best platform for the experience as it aggregates all the impactful components of the XR verse: Presence, Persistence, Scale, Awareness, Interactivity, Respect, and Sentience. It’s somewhat of a venture into the unknown for Team PHORIA, as Magic Leap applications are still challenging and rare to develop. But we know that by harnessing the power of XR through Magic Leap, we can amplify CSIRO’s reach.

We built the experience to fit within a modular framework, which will allow future research to be layered over an expanding digital twin. This is part of the trend towards mixed reality experiences, where data is holographically overlaid onto physical environments and updated in real time. As we continue to produce more experiences with CSIRO, we’ll be able to expose all the different layers of their research into Enlightened Industry.

If we support CSIRO as they initiate a paradigm shift across industries, the world of the future might look very different from our current trajectory.

What is Enlightened Industry?

We are currently in the grips of Industry 4.0. Where Industry 3.0 was the trend towards computers and the internet, Industry 4.0 signals a new trend towards cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and cognitive computing. We’re seeing the rise of dark factories, as manufacturers opt for processes run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics, only minimally assisted by a human workforce. It’s projected that 40% of the global industrial robotic supply will be installed in China this year. And this trend is only going to continue growing.

Does this mean that industries are enlightened?

Not the way CSIRO sees it. True, the jump from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 is significant, to say the least. But CSIRO wants to go much further — we’re talking Industry 5.0.

Think the combination of digital technology, autonomous systems and complex engineering in materials science — the result of which would be to redefine the global supply chain as we currently know it.

Manufacturing pipelines replaced by decentralised networks of completely automated hubs, helped along by data sensors.

AIM recognises the need to take a transdisciplinary approach to bring this vision to alive, and this ability to combine numerous discipline-specific approaches is what will truly allow AIM to tackle future challenges, such as global food production.

What does this mean for Food Production?

In the first episode of our XR series, we’re looking at how the concept of Enlightened Industry will transform the relationship between Agriculture and Manufacturing.

One big outcome in the shift from a linear supply chain to a networked supply chain will be the creation of a Food Loss Bank.

Many of us don’t realise the extent of food loss that occurs within the current production pipeline. The reality is really disarming. Annually, it’s a loss of 1.6 billion tonnes, and it occurs at every single stage gate along the way: production, harvest, post-harvest handling, storage, distribution, food processing and point of consumption.

It’s waste we can’t afford.

CSIRO’s Food Loss Bank will minimise loss and maximise sustainability by redirecting edible biomass back into a revolutionary food network, where it will be broken down into nutrient-dense food products.

Personalised Food Generators will be able to use these products to print specialised food, promoting healthy biofunction and longevity for all of us. That’s right — food specifically tailored to support your body. It might sound incredible — too futuristic, too out there — but this kind of smart food system isn’t far away.

CSIRO want to transform food production by 2030.

It’s CSIRO’s targeted approach on a macro and micro level that is the uncompromising action we need to take if we want to become truly smarter in the way we live. So forget about Industry 4.0 — the future is Enlightened.

Experience Enlightenment in Magic Leap

CSIRO launched the experience at Avalon Airshow, and will continue to feature the experience with at their future events. We hope you can get to one of these events to test it out in Magic Leap.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect:

And expect more of it, because we aren’t stopping here. The next installment in the series is already well and truly in motion and we can’t wait to share it with you all.

We hope that synthesising CSIRO’s research through XR storytelling will energise industry leaders and create a trend of investing in best industry practices. If we can rally around Enlightened Industry, the world of the future might look more like this: