Factory? No. Studio? No. Infinite possibilities? Yes!

“Hybrid Shopfloor” is the name of the media space that we had the pleasure of creating together with MCI Deutschland for Bosch Rexroth. In the new Customer and Innovation Center (CU.BE) in Ulm we created an innovative presentation environment for the Factory of the Future. We created a modular setup that offers customisable and intelligently networked sales and presentation tools in interactive, augmented spaces. Sounds like buzzword bingo par excellance, but there’s a lot of function and added value here.

From Digital Twin to Virtual Triplet

Industry 4.0 as an innovation machine produces increasingly complex production chains, factory processes, services and technologies. The industry speaks of digital twins, which represent the real factory assets and systems and make their interaction observable and verifiable. Our Hybrid Shopfloor now allows that in real time and on site:

1. both real processes can be experienced and understood.
2. augmented information enriches the real processes with media.
3. simulations for systems of the day after tomorrow can be played out virtually.
4. spatial extensions of the actual factory with alternative scenarios.

What you don’t see…

A digital environment with high-tech products seems only appropriate for the high-tech solutions presented, including their digital twins. The technology that stands in the background and provides Bosch Rexroth with an interactive sales tool remains largely hidden:

• The ShowControl, enables the precise orchestration of the real robots with the virtual 3D world with the industry tool Camunda.
• The LED wall is equipped with an XR game engine: The real-time renderings always show the correct perspective for the viewers, depending on the camera position.
• The Modular Storytelling Engine contains a constantly growing kit of always up-to-date building blocks for individual storytelling according to the target group, including animations, videos, sound and lighting elements.

Marketing, sales or prototyping tool?

Bosch Rexroth uses the media extension of the real shop floor as a tool in sales talks.

But the marketing, product development and prototyping teams are also empowered,

• discuss applications that they could not show before.
• visualise the added value of their digital solutions.
• demonstrate the flexibility of processes.
• to present in a target-group-specific way.

For this project, we worked together with a large number of international experts and are proud and happy that the rooms and the ModelFab are used daily and will soon be developed further, together with our partners. Georgi Musev is always the right contact person for questions.