Augmented virtuality for the next generation production intelligence

Several compelling IT trends of the past few years show us how the next possible paradigm change in business intelligence could remodel everything in production informatics. Along the example of Virtual Reality and a community-based granulated software ecosystem, namely the Node.js world and its interference with the System of Systems and Internet of Anything concepts, the presentation will uncover a really powerful future of Industrial software systems. Evolution of the Node.js world started back in 2008, when Google released the powerful V8 JavaScript engine and Ryan Dahl began using it as a general purpose virtual machine allowing millions of JS developers to create server-side or practically any computer applications for all purposes using common web technologies. Thanks to many beneficial conjunctions like the GitHub and Npm communities as well as the Node friendly PaaS (e.g., MS Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Bluemix, Heroku) today Node.js-based technologies aspire to be a common language of large-scale distributed Internet of Anything systems considering the non mission critical layers. Our research team investigates new ideas to connect distributed Industrial system elements (sensors, actuators, control logic, intelligent machines, data logging and data mining) to each other and represents them in a Virtual World forming a general purpose information pool which allows for large-scale heterogeneous production systems. The last part of the presentation summarizes the results and ideas of a newly developed software engine, called MAXWHERE that provides effective working environments with spatial (Virtual Reality) multimedia arrangement and Intelligent System of Systems connectivity. The fundamental idea behind MAXWHERE is the generalization of the Document Object Model (DOM) introducing the Where Object Model (WOM) concept that covers the conventional WEB contents as well as the VR/AR building blocks in a coherent way empowered by the newest generation web APIs. Typical applications of MAXWHERE includes industrial monitoring and facility support, context-based collaborative working environment, industrial training, and Interactive live presentations.