6.2023-London-iQ3Connect

ALI MERCHANT: Hello, everyone. My name is Ali Merchant. I'm the CEO and founder of IQ3 Connect, a Aero-Astro alum. And some of the research I'm going to talk about has come out of the Aero-Astro department. And I want to thank BT and MIT ILP to give us this really amazing opportunity to talk about the next evolution in digital work and learning.

So what we're doing is we're taking very large amounts of 3D data and making it easily usable to create 3D environments that can be used with VR/AR devices and really simplifying how this is done. So we all love our Zoom meetings, but these were great for many industries but they're not good for industrial applications. We are trying to do training, which requires today hands-on interactions, and you want to virtualize all these complex processes.

And so for that, we VR and AR and these 3D technologies are gaining a lot of traction. But the problem is that it's very expensive. Creating these 3D environments is almost like a movie production. And in a fast, agile work environment, you need to be able to make rapid changes to these 3D environments by anyone. So the problem is, how can you do these quickly, make it very easy to access for anyone to use in their daily business.

And so what we've done is we've taken-- one of the key problems here is taking these large amounts of 3D data and making it very easily, preparing it automatically. So we're moving something that takes manual work today and moving it into the cloud and making it basically a computational problem. And then we're combining that with no code tools so that you can very quickly create training environments and many other broad applications of VR/AR that can be used by anyone.

We have created fast multi-user workspaces. So now you can take these 3D environments and access them almost like Zoom meetings. So you can think of meeting rooms where multiple people can meet and talk about manufacturing assemblies and training and so on and so forth. And we are delivering this through a web browser. So everybody uses web browser and it becomes extremely easy and accessible.

OK. And we're using open standards to actually do this, so you don't need to install anything and it becomes a very scalable solution in an IT environment where you're concerned about how am I going to install this and how are people going to use this.

And it's device agnostic. So while you want to have an immersive experience, it can also be accessed on the desktop. So during COVID, our customers were actually using this on standard issue laptops and collaborating in these immersive 3D environments in ways that we had not even imagined. And you can see here some examples.

So we are creating engineering accurate environments. We're not worried about fancy metaverse-like things, but how can we make it accurate for technical applications. And here you can see a completely virtual environment here, and taking that same data and putting it in an augmented environment in the physical space.

And this has opened up a range of applications. So you can see companies that are using it for bridge construction. And you can see here, collaborating across hundreds of miles and really making it easy to make decisions on complex design problems. Oil and gas products, the company out in Leeds-- and you can see the complexity of the data and we are bringing in multiple people into these fast collaborative environments.

Automotive, health care, as well as learning environments that are being shared across multiple countries. So from the largest scales to the smallest scales, we're enabling this whole new way of collaborating and connecting people together.

The customer success I'd like to talk about today is a very interesting company. It's a Fortune 200 company and they make extremely custom machines for manufacturing pretty much every chip in the world. So all your LCD displays and so on and so forth.

And the challenge they face is how do they start training large numbers of technicians all over the world. And they were bringing them to training centers and so on. And so we provided them with our solution. And it's sort of packaged in a very simple way. So they can select the 3D content, essentially schedule a meeting and meet. So it's instead of using Teams or Zoom, they're actually using this 3D IQ3 environment. And as you can see here, I don't have any digital images here, but the machines are as complex and technicians can actually crawl in and they could be halfway around the world.

So this is a very interesting-- and all you need is a web browser and you can use it with immersive or non-immersive environments. So we've taken something that was using Teams and slides and really flat, flat screen into something that is immersive 3D and really connecting people from all over the world for solving these technical problems.

So we're here today. We are still at a very early stage in this exciting journey. But our product is available in the market today. It's a SaaS platform. You can just sign up and use it. There are many companies that are piloting the software, so we will be interested in software pilots which can be mutually beneficial. Technology, R&D on data transfer, networking. There are so many challenges to really enhance the user experience and connectivity and really make this scalable and kind of democratize this 3D technology.

We are also based in Boston, but we have a global footprint. We have companies all over the world using this. And we're very open to regional partnerships to really introduce this whole new way of communicating and collaborating into new markets.

And with that, I'd like to thank everyone. And we may have a demo outside, so please come and visit us on our table. Thank you.