As part of the Berlin Center for Digital Transformation, the VISCOM business unit is working on the ProEnv project to research smart production and maintenance environments of the future.

These environments are intended to enable mobile, context-based work and multimedia interaction, and cooperation with production facilities. The coupling of the plants and processes with their virtual images and models is to take place in real-time. Augmented reality technologies provide assistance in the working environments. In particular, this involves the mobile provision of context-based information for employees in their respective tasks and situations as well as new possibilities for multimedia and multimodal interaction and cooperation with the plant systems.

The project will also equip an industrial robot workstation with augmented reality solutions, projection technology, real-time object recognition, gesture recognition, real-time 3D reconstruction, and a digital twin to make the entire workflow more intuitive and efficient.

The scientists of the business unit VISCOM use augmented reality technologies as well as visualization and projection techniques in the project to display information, such as instructions or questions to the operator, directly on and on the workpiece to be processed. He can make decisions at the touch of a finger, e.g., select the edge to be milled. The exact current position and orientation of the workpiece have been determined by a camera-based object recognition system developed in-house.

The Fraunhofer institutes FOKUS, HHI, IPK, and IZM are working together on the project. The Berlin Center for Digital Transformation is funded by the governing mayor of Berlin, the senate chancellery - higher education and research and by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE).