The virtual chocolate factory: Building a real world mixed-reality system for industrial collaboration and control

Virtual, mobile, and mixed reality systems have diverse uses for data visualization and remote collaboration in industrial settings, especially factories. We report our experiences in designing complex mixed-reality collaboration, control, and display systems for a real-world factory, for delivering real-time factory information to multiple types of users. In collaboration with TCHO, a chocolate maker in San Francisco, our research group is building a virtual "mirror" world of a real-world chocolate factory and its processes. Sensor data is imported into the multi-user 3D environment from hundreds of sensors on the factory floor. The resulting "virtual factory" is designed for simulation, visualization, and collaboration, using a set of interlinked, real-time layers of information about the factory and its processes. We are also looking at appropriate industrial uses for mobile devices such as cell phones and tablet computers, and how they intersect with virtual worlds and mixed realities. For example, an experimental iPhone web app provides mobile laboratory monitoring and control. The mobile system is integrated with the database underlying the virtual factory world. These systems were deployed at the real-world factory and lab in 2009, and are now in beta development. Through this mashup of mobile, social, mixed and virtual technologies, we hope to create industrial systems for enhanced collaboration between physically remote people and places - for example, factories in China with managers in Japan or the US.