SPATIAL COMPUTING SELF-SERVICE: THE POWER OF ALTOURA’S EXPERIENCE PLATFORM

At Altoura, we empower organizations to harness the power of spatial computing to increase productivity and lower costs. Every customer we work with inevitably identifies multiple business processes that can be improved when users are able to collaborate remotely in highly realistic virtual 3D spaces. These spaces, combined with the collaboration solutions we build, give organizations the ability to train and educate users without the cost of bringing employees to a physical location—and the benefits of a highly scalable and always-on solution.

Customer driven at Altoura means that we shape our product to meet the needs of our customers and the marketplace by asking a lot of questions from the moment a sales introduction happens and all the way to project delivery and beyond.

THE VALUE OF CUSTOMIZABLE EXPERIENCE

In fact, our work with several Fortune 500 companies over the past year highlights growing demand for collaboration and training environments that can be customized in-house, easily tested, and rapidly deployed. As we explored how to address these needs, we also brainstormed internally how to empower our customers to create and manage spatial computing experiences on their own to help reduce development and deployment costs. From these requirements, the Altoura Experience Platform—a low-code development tool—was born.

The Experience Designer makes it easy to create step-by-step training, simulations, product testing scenarios, and many more experiences without having to engage developers or courseware designers. This gives teams a lot of flexibility to test various use cases and optimize them to build a compelling learning path for employees.

INTRODUCING THE ALTOURA EXPERIENCE PLATFORM: A TECHNICAL PRIMER

At a very fundamental level, our Experience Platform is a state machine that gives users an authoring tool—Experience Designer—in the Altoura portal. State machines can be found in many devices that perform a predetermined sequence of actions depending on a sequence of events with which they are presented. Common examples are vending machines, which dispense products when the proper combination of coins is deposited, elevators, whose sequence of stops is determined by the floors requested by riders, and combination locks, which require the input of a sequence of numbers in the proper order.

Let me share some use cases where the Altoura Experience Platform drove real-world results and business impact.

Pilot Training with Qantas

One of the most common workflows the Experience Platform enables is instructional (step-by-step) training. Pilot training is highly mission critical, but also costly since it requires scheduling pilots traveling to spend time in costly simulator machines. Qantas turned to Altoura to enable virtual training for employees to reduce both of these expenses.

Each step of the pilot training sequence is a state. Once the experience is in a certain state, the system listens for the correct inputs or actions which will move it to the next state. The Qantas team designed this particular experience to require the pilots (who wears a HoloLens device) to rotate his or her hand to indicate flipping an ignition switch. Once the system detects that the event has been triggered, it transitions to the next state. During the transition, the system checks the box to indicate to the user that the event has been successfully triggered.

Role Play and Decision Nodes at Orange Theory Fitness

Now let’s look at a customer experience that we created with Orange Theory Fitness. The image below shows three successive stages of the experience:

The first stage is what we call a decision-based node where the user is presented with multiple options and has to choose which path they want to take. Each option selection is an event, and depending on which button the user selects, the system advances to the next programmed stage.

We use the same decision-based node system for showing annotations for real estate tours, or for creating product testing workflows.

LOW-CODE EXPERIENCE AUTHORING

To author an experience in the Altoura portal does not require development experience. With limited training, our customers can author experiences that prove the value of spatial computing inside their organization. Here is a screen shot of the authoring experience for the Orange Theory Fitness experience just discussed:

The user simply uses the Experience Designer to create different states of the experience and tie them together in a graphical manner.

THE BUSINESS CASE: 30%-40% COST SAVINGS

The Altoura Experience Platform enables organizations to use a low-code tool to link multiple spatial computing workflows to create compelling experiences and reap a much larger ROI than custom-built applications. Our experience working with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike proves a consistent savings of between 30% and 40% over the cost of special-purpose applications.

Spatial computing is now being deployed as an enabling technology to power a new wave of applications to make organizations more productive and more competitive. And many of these new applications address the needs of remote work forces that need to learn, collaborate, and train during the ongoing pandemic. It is therefore imperative to invest in solutions that offer the ability to design the kinds of experiences that drive measurable business impact and employee readiness. Based on customer feedback, we believe Altoura and our Experience Platform offer a compelling value proposition for organizations of all sizes.

Want to learn more? Have feedback? I’d love to hear from you. Reach me at [email protected]. Read the original article on blogs.altoura.com.