PLM And New Types Of User Experience

User experience is important. It comes with all cool gadgets, Web 2.0 websites and iPhone apps. I think, people started to understand it even in enterprise organizations. I can hear lots of people voices asking when enterprise tools will become cooler than today. The obvious answer of PLM and other related vendors for many years was 3D. Everything looks better in 3D – visualization, animation, etc. I want to focus on few examples of trends that can potentially introduce new types of user experience.

Augmented Reality
The latest trend in 3D space is augmenting reality. It helps us to mix virtual and real 3D spaces into a single one. The nice thing about it is that it helps you to realize the potential of your product before it even comes to prototyping and manufacturing. I had chance to see many examples of augmented reality. One of the best ones is iQ Toyota. The impressive piece of this video is how you can create a virtual disassemble of the car.

3D Working Environment
This example is actually coming from the BumpTop acquisition Google made this week. BumpTop is a nice idea simulating real 3D environment on your desktop. And it is specially interesting, since the existing desktops remain unchanged the last 10-15 years, and it sounds like a potential change in this place. I can imaging it coming to the product design environment too.

Voice Collaborative Communication
In my view, this is the most unusual one. I’ve been watching Siri – assistant application since it was introduced last year on iPhone. This is a nice example of collaborative application that interact with user in a very unusual and intuitive manner. I posted about this apps few mounts ago in my article – What Are You Questions PLM Virtual Assistant? So, this company was acquired by Apple earlier this week, which means for me Apple is investing in more intuitive ways of collaboration and communication. I think, this is also something that can fit very well today’s product development environment.

So, what is my conclusion? I can definitely see something new is coming in user experience and communication. The trends in  communication and collaboration made by non-PLM software manufacturers can outrun design and engineering software vendors. PLM vendors are dealing with a huge amount of legacy code and legacy implementations. However, this is a time to think about what can bring next potential leap in collaborative manufacturing, engineering and design software.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg