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On August 26th, 2020, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) hosted a webinar to publicly introduce the NIST extended reality community of interest.

The panel was comprised of members of NIST working to explore new approaches to bridge the communication gap between human and machine. Facilitating and leading the webinar was Shelly Bagchi, along with speakers, Bill Bernstein, Matt Hoehler, Scott Ledgerwood, and Jeremy Marvel. The NIST mission statement is to promote United States innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life. The goal of the community of interest is to leverage technology for use in our own domain. A few examples are manipulating a robotic arm through a head mounted display, or a first responder using virtual reality to locate the best points of entry into a building.

The discussion鈥檚 main focus was to give the public an overview of future advances with video demonstrations and insight from researchers within NIST labs working in augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality. The community of interest consists of four different domains. These domains include addressing the interoperability of industrial augmented reality (AR) systems in smart manufacturing, enabling immersive visualizations of severe fire environments, designing and evaluating XR tools for first responders, and leveraging XR to develop and evaluate metrology for human-robot interaction.

The first domain was addressing the interoperability of industrial AR systems in smart manufacturing presented by Bernstein. According to Bernstein some of the most popular uses of AR are in maintenance and assembly. This domain is about trying to leverage many sensors for understanding the best path to navigate through a facility. The main focus is on the data representative side, more specifically interoperability, which is the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information. Their research goal is to test or append standard representations of geospatial definitions for production systems to facilitate quicker, more adaptable AR application development. As stated by Bernstein, a few standards of interest are W3C鈥檚 WebXR Device API, OGC鈥檚 Geopose Standards WG, and OGC鈥檚 IndoorGML. Bernstein concluded his section of the webinar by talking about on-going and future work, such as geotagging manufacturing assets, spatially aligning as-executed to as-planned data and integrating the digital thread with XR platforms.

The second domain, enabling immersive visualizations of severe fire environments, was presented by Hoehler. Working at the National Fire Research Laboratory, where they test civil engineering infrastructures against extreme events such as earthquakes and fires, Hoehler began working with 360 degrees camera technology to document large scale experiments. The goal in fire science is to leave the cameras inside the fires over the entire course of the fire, there as to gather research about the growth and development of fires. According to Hoehler, high-resolution omni-directional cameras are rapidly getting smaller, better and cheaper and prompted them to create the Burn Observation Bubble prototype version 1.0. With the help of this prototype, data augmented 360-degree video automatically provides the spatial and temporal context for data. Hoehler finished his section of the webinar by showing actual video examples of how the prototype works and what data it helps the researchers collect.

The third domain, designing and evaluating XR tools for first responders, was presented by Ledgerwood. Public safety personnel are tasked with performing in a variety of challenging environments such as extreme heat or cold, underwater, and low-visibility settings, among others. The goal of the Public Safety Communications Research division is to improve the technology-based systems by using a two-pronged approach. The first approach is to get a better understanding of the first responders and their experience by research and testing methodologies. The other approach is by then using virtual and augmented reality for a testbed, instead of costly experiments in terms of time, money, and safety. Ledgerwood concluded his section of the webinar by speaking on how they want to use technology to create simulations that can simulate training activities for the first responders. According to Ledgerwood, the majority of their focus is on developing prototypes and proven concepts about how technology can be leveraged by first responders in the field.

The fourth domain, leveraging XR to develop and evaluate metrology for human-robot interaction, was presented by Marvel. This domain鈥檚 goal is to deliver a suite of test methods, protocols, and information models to enable effective, human-robot collaboration in manufacturing and advance interactive robot technologies to facilitate the safe and efficient teaming of people and robots that maximally leverages the strengths and capabilities of each toward meeting production goals. According to Marvel, some of the technological challenges in human-robot interaction is industrial robots are notoriously difficult and extensive training is required for use, and robots have no concept of humans in the area leading to situation awareness being nonexistence. Marvel completed his section of the webinar by touching on some of the metrics of XR in human-robot interactions. One of their goals is to understand how well and how closely does the virtual robot match with the real-world robot, along with the coordination and synchronization actions.

To read and learn more about the NIST extended reality community of interest check out their website !

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