According to Kyle Daughtry, digital reality capability architect with ExxonMobil, there's "a tsunami of data" on the horizon, and it's about to hit the shore.
"A study revealed that between 2016 and 2021, there was an increase of data of about 4300 percent," Daughtry said. "The amount of data since then has grown exponentially, and will continue to grow."
Data, Daughtry said, has become the biggest component of people's journeys and strategies of the past decade, "and we need new ways to interpret and understand that information and data."
For industry to effectively move from the Age of Data into the Age of Experience, Daughtry said, leaders must better determine what they do with data, and how they visualize and understand it.
Athicha Dhanormchitphong, enterprise 3D architect for ExxonMobil's digital reality ecosystem, extrapolated applying data to the example of consumers who make purchases online from Amazon.com.
"Do you check the reviews to make decisions? Those reviews summarize the human experience. They are the written data of that human experience, with supporting images," he said. "Sometimes, a 3D aspect actually shows you how the product fits in your home. That's what we mean by the Age of Experience."
"We've got maintenance records, isometrics drawings, equipment records, risk - you name it," he continued. "We're trying to visualize that to scale, but how do we do that when we're still stuck in a 2D world?"
Daughtry said the Age of Experience creates a future "where an operator can walk out into the field and have access to all of this information in real time, at any point in time," by utilizing mobile devices that allow him or her to digitally assess the area.
"Or it's from a device worn on your head that allows hands-free access to information," he said.
Dhanormchitphong shared four "cornerstone pillars" to help accomplish this transformation of digital reality systems.
The first pillar, he said, is to democratize the capture of 3D data.
"Let's start by hearing the stories from our operators and what they do, exactly," he said.
The second pillar is determining a centralized storage point for that data, followed by the building of autonomous pipelines to access data.
"There are so many ways we deliver it," Dhanormchitphong said, during the Industrial XR Global Summit, held recently in Houston.
The final pillar is to allow the data to be consumed anytime and anywhere by determining modalities of that data.
"'Capture, store, deliver and consume' is what we call the lifecycle of our 3D assets," he said. "It's been a novel way, but it really helps the corporation align."
Dhanormchitphong emphasized that 3D must be at the core if this effort, and it's got to be connected."
"We have issues with systems where we couldn't get out, but we need to be inter-operable," Dhanormchitphong said. "I want to be able to take my data in and out and separate it. I need it to be modular to corporate scale and integrate it."
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From left are Kyle Daughtry, digital reality capability architect with ExxonMobil and Athicha Dhanormchitphong, enterprise 3D architect for ExxonMobil’s digital reality ecosystem
The ultimate goal, Dhanormchitphong said, is to extend the life cycle over 3D assets through a wide range of modalities, including augmented reality, virtual reality and a hybrid that mixes both.
"We need to build this ecosystem to allow integration of data to move to a more visual way of working," he said.
The transformation to the Age of Experience is already happening, Daughtry said, but observed that one of the greatest challenges to that transformation is in the mindset and attitudes of the workforce.
"Why would we work in a 2D world, or environment, on a thing in a world that is actually three dimensional?" he asked. "Really, the biggest transformation for us is in our heads - how we move to a more visual way of working and, by doing that, allow transformation through the business lines."
