Industrial Immersive Week: The Digital Reality Summit of the Summer

To beat the heat and close out the summer with a bang, the HUVR team made  our way over to the Industrial Immersive Week event hosted by the event pros at Innovate Energy. The event took place at the Omni Hotel in Houston and was accentuated by good food and great company!  It was also jam-packed with all the latest cutting-edge XR/Digital Reality technology – in fact, our Director of Business Development Quinn Holub quipped that it was “the most Oculus headsets he’d ever seen in one room!” This show explored the evidence for practical XR applications and the value that digital reality technology can drive in the field. 

The appeal of this event went beyond fun gadgets like the Oculus headset. The Industrial Immersive Week dove deep into industry expertise and the applications of new digital technologies for training, turnarounds, digital twin applications and more, helping attendees translate innovation and motivation into a clear path forward.

Our team was asked to speak at the event and we were cheering loudly when our VP Business Development and Strategy, Chris Haines, took to the stage. He was joined by Trevor MacMaster, Chief Client Officer at VEERUM – one of our digital twin partner organizations. In their session, “Delivering on the Promise of Operational Efficiency: Industrial Digital Twins, Asset Inspections & 3D Tech”, Haines and MacMaster discussed the challenges that digital twins can solve for O&G and renewable energy companies, and built upon the discussion started earlier that month with our joint 3D Contextualization webinar with VEERUM and Osprey. 

Of course, we were honored to be selected to speak, but the real stars of the show were Kyle Daughtry and Athica “M” Dhanormchitphong, members of the ExxonMobil Digital Reality Ecosystem (DRE) team, and esteemed HUVR customers. These two packed the house with this speech, so much so that our team was quarantined to the standing room only section at the back of the house. We were still able to find the speakers’ eyes amongst the crowd, however, when they kindly gave us a nod in discussing key technologies that are helping them pave the way toward a more visual way of working. 

In this session titled “Digital Reality Ecosystem 3.0 – What’s Next?” Kyle and M talked about how the ExxonMobil DRE team is staying ahead of the curve by moving toward a more visual way of working. To do so, they are embracing augmented reality and digital twin technologies to handle – and capitalize upon – the tsunami of data that new digital tools are creating. They also explained how creating a digital reality ecosystem is enabling workflows to utilize 3D scans more effectively across departments and processes, including turnaround planning and maintenance, and transforming how data is captured, stored, delivered and consumed. Their approach to innovate, incubate, and accelerate left the crowd anxious to enable their teams with 3D technology. 

Our team took many insights from the talk, chief among them the latent need to integrate asset integrity data within a three-dimensional context in order to enable mechanical workflows like turnaround planning and remote engineering assessments. 

Overall, this event answered the question, “where do we go next with 3D and digital reality tools?” and “how do we apply these technologies to essential mechanical workflows to gain time and operational efficiencies?” We were lucky to be in the presence of so many great minds, and grateful to our gracious hosts at Innovate Energy, Sean Guerre and Julien DuPont, for putting on the next big event since their show-stopping Energy Drones and Robotics Summit hosted in June. We can’t wait to see this conference continue to flourish and continue to bring new insights to asset owners/operators in the future.