Being at the Epicentre of the AR Movement

And given our CEO, Mark Mondello, has publicly gone on record stating that he wants “Jabil to become the most technologically advanced manufacturing solutions provider on the planet," our company is completely aligned and committed to leveraging technology in order to: a) help our customers innovate new products; b) help ourselves become more agile and fast, which also delivers great value to our customers in the end; and c) create new business models at Jabil that will deliver accretive revenue and drive shareholder value.

Cantrell is fully supportive and extremely engaged when it comes to testing our initiatives both from a compute power as well as big data perspective. He leverages a host of partnerships, crossing both on-prem and cloud based solutions. We can quickly stand up proof of concepts and validate or dismiss scenarios quickly, and his people, all walk the walk, when it comes to pro-active support.

In fact, I am writing a whitepaper on the ‘Augmented Age’, where tools don’t just do what we ask or program them to do, they collaborate with us to combine supercomputing and big data with human skills, experience and intuition to deliver better outcomes. For example, voice recognition and Virtual Reality (VR) are being deployed to design complex devices or products. Systems that use AI can suggest and simulate multiple options quickly, whilst gesture control and a VR headset can allow the designer to manipulate that design easily and quickly. This hybrid human-machine solution can quickly create an outcome that might have previously taken numerous iteration and prototype stages to reach the same conclusion. Combine this with rapid prototyping tools like 3D printing and you start to see how we shorten the time between idea and success. What makes this more exciting is our involvement in developing VR headset technology in the first place.

Driven initially by the gaming industry, the AR market is slated for explosive growth, with figures in excess of $5 Billion suggested for 2108. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, AR along with AI was one of the most discussed topics. In his CES keynote address, President and CEO of NVIDIA Jen-Hsun Huang, talked about ‘the Intelligent Industrial Revolution’ and “the big bang of modern AI." NVIDIA also announced partnerships with numerous companies, including a collaboration with Bosch on an AI computer specifically for autonomous driving that uses both AI and AR to create systems that support drivers, learn from them and improve road safety as well as delivering a new ‘augmented’ driving experience.

Many of these developments, particularly the processing power supercomputers and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), have been driven by the hugely demanding world of gaming, but that development is finding its way elsewhere. Also at CES and equally excited about AR was Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, whose press conference led the audience of journalists through a series of pre-recorded and live VR experiences, starting with an immersive wingsuit flight over the Moab in Utah before taking them courtside at an NCAA basketball game before experiencing a zombie apocalypse in the new “Arizona Sunshine” VR game, all powered by 7th Generation Intel^® Core^™ processor-based PCs and Oculus Rift VR headsets.

“Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face, just by putting on goggles in your home,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, after they acquired Oculus in 2014. Facebook sees VR as a new communication platform that will, according to Mark Zuckerberg “become a part of daily life for billions of people.”

It’s hard to find a company that is not excited about AR, especially in concert with AI. It doesn’t matter if you are a carmaker, a healthcare provider, a military or avionics company, a consumer electronics giant, an entertainment and sports franchise or an optics company; just about everyone is getting ready for the Augmented age.

We are, and the good news is our CIO is more than ready!