Global Challenges and Innovative Technologies Geared toward New Markets: Prospects for Virtual and Augmented Reality

Effective applied research is based on close collaboration between research and industry, which, taking the findings of basic research on customer demands as its starting point, creates new means to develop and market innovative products. What is more, growing demands for innovative and sustainable results of research and development are prompting the examination of global trends such as demographic change, growing megacities, rising energy consumption and increasing traffic and the resultant social challenges. These trends and increasing traffic in particular are giving rise to new fields of work, especially for digital technologies, as a social responsibility, e.g. on driver assistance and traffic control systems that increase safety. The social challenges are increasingly affecting markets and requiring new innovative products, efficient production processes and integrative forms of human resource development and training and qualification. The virtualization and digitization of objects and processes is becoming an enabler of the development of new strategies and concepts such as smart cities, green energy, electric vehicle networks, smart manufacturing and smart logistics. This paper examines means by which digital engineering and virtual and augmented reality technologies can support the creation of sustainable smart manufacturing and smart logistics processes as well as on-the-job training and qualification and knowledge transfer (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.