Apple’s Vision Pro enters Industry 4.0 with Dassault Systèmes

Are you ready for Vision Pro week? Well, you should be as hot on the heels of some highly significant enterprise-focused visionOS improvements, Apple has entered a new initiative that puts its device at the heart of future manufacturing. In this case, it’s a partnership with global brand Dassault Systèmes.

At the 3D Experience Forum in Houston, Dassault Systemes announced a new 3DLive visionOS app designed for customers in manufacturing and product design.

It’s all about digital twins, which let customers quickly adapt to market demand and deliver accurate product quality, training, and more. In other words, the app can be seen as a real-world active deployment of spatial computing in vital product, manufacturing, and engineering scenarios. It is very much what visionOS is all about.

Virtual twins, manufacturing, design, and Industry 4.0

The company said it worked with Apple to integrate Vision Pro into its 3D Experience platform. It combines with Dassault’s own generative AI (genAI) and its 3D UNIV+RSES, to “unleash unprecedented possibilities.

“Our engineering collaboration with Apple represents a bold advance that reveals the power of 3D UNIV+RSES, where 3D is a universal language for a new world combining real and virtual,” Elisa Prisner, Dassault Systèmes’ executive vice president for corporate strategy and platform transformation, said in a statement. “The wide and growing adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform by our clients makes this cooperation a unique value for our gigantic, highly diversified customer base, seeing the high potential of 3D UNIV+RSES to collaborate and train our next generation AI-based experiences on their own virtual twin data set.”

“Apple Vision Pro continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible with spatial computing and is changing the way people work across key industries,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group. “We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Dassault Systèmes to supercharge the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with spatial computing capabilities that will enable engineers and designers to effortlessly bring 3D designs to life in ways not previously possible.”

What does it do?

The idea is that virtual twins created on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be explored in virtual 3D space. More importantly, it enables teams to collaborate on projects, thanks to Vision Pro’s advanced cameras, sensors and tracking, which allow virtual twins to interact with the physical world around them in 3D UNIV+RSES with scientific accuracy.

Imagine, for example, you are working to develop industrial machinery of some kind. Using these tools, you could build a virtual representation of the machine and use the built-in AI to put your creation through virtual real-world tests to identify problems in the design and find improvements. This is going to be considerably less expensive and risky than actual physical prototyping.

Alternatively, when assessing devices for maintenance, the digital twin can show how things are meant to work, helping to identify ongoing flaws. The same applies to any form of product design and should make it much easier and cheaper to develop new product and bring it to market — particularly as teams can collaborate on these designs in real or asynchronous time from anywhere in the world using Vision Pro and Dassault Systemes’ solutions.

Can anyone have a go?

If you use Vision Pro (as I wish I had the opportunity to do), you can try this tech for yourself. Dassault Systèmes is publishing a visionOS app called HomeByMe Reality to visualize different home interiors. You can use this at home, in a showroom, or in a furniture store. The app can also enable people to virtually tour real estate property.

Enterprise customers will be able to download Dassault Systèmes’ new 3DLive app for Apple Vision Pro this summer. 

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