Data61 opens ‘game-changing’ Mixed Reality Lab

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Data61, the data and digital specialist arm of the CSIRO, has unveiled a “game-changing” testing facility for local industries, announcing the completion of its multi-purpose ‘digital twinning’ lab.
 

The Mixed Reality Lab will offer a multiplicity of industries – most notably from manufacturing, mining, health and agriculture – the opportunity to build virtual replicas, or ‘digital twins’, of physical objects and systems, allowing components to be tested and validated in a simulated environment.

The Lab houses industrial and consumer optical cameras and sensing equipment to capture detailed information about a physical object and the space surrounding it. Sensor and video equipment within the facility will be “underpinned by sophisticated algorithms which merge the enormous amounts of data collected to create a digital twin in a matter of minutes,” researchers said.

The Lab is also backed by Data61’s own Workspace platform – a scientific workflow framework that enables collaboration and software reuse.

Matt Bolger, senior software engineer at CSIRO’s Data61, said the technology will prove a “game-changer” for industry participants, allowing them to “quickly, accurately and cost-effectively identify defects and map entire manufacturing processes across a global supply chain.”

“Defective components can be identified in real-time and corrected, while downstream processes can be adjusted to minimise the impact of delays,” he said.

The Mixed Reality Lab can be also scaled depending on the size of the object being scanned.

By 2020, IDC estimates that 30 per cent of the top 2000 global companies will be using data from Digital Twins of Internet of Things (IoT) connected assets to improve product innovation success rates and organisational productivity, achieving gains of up to 25 per cent.