Welcome to the Internet of Experiences
Stephen Chadwick, Dassault Systèmes
A technology revolution is underway in which sensors, networks, and analytics software connects physical objects and infrastructure to computing systems, writes Stephen Chadwick, the managing director for EuroNorth at Dassault Systèmes.
This provides an unprecedented view of the status, location, and activities of products, assets, and people. This is the Internet of Things (IoT) that the BBC describes as a ‘layer of digital information which covers the physical world.’
According to Forrester Research “While smart homes and cool gadgets get the headlines its the non glamour applications that get the traction”. It is estimated that the internet of things will connect 50bn things over the next 5 years in a market worth up to £1.5tn.
On one level, the IoT offers an affordable means to understand and manage much of our world from a distance while giving things the data and capabilities they need to autonomously manage themselves. In many cases once the things in the IoT are connected and given a voice, they become more than just things. They become part of a living experience shaped by interactions between people, places and objects, among products, nature and life. They become contributors to what beckons just beyond the IoT: the Internet of Experiences.
While participants in the IoT tend to focus on things the Internet of Experiences aims higher by concentrating on what becomes possible when smart devices piggyback off one another’s capabilities to create experiences: innovative services that simplify and enhance daily life and commerce in ways never previously possible. This will enable industrial equipment, transport, power and infrastructure facilities to report their status and autonomously prompt appropriate action. For example a computer could dispatch drones equipped with the right equipment to locally available experts who know when they will arrive and be prepared with the necessary resources and skills to engage with situations individually or as a team.
At home advances in robotics coupled to IoT are revolutionising our lives in the immediate and longer term. Family and care-robots for the elderly, or those with special needs, such as Pepper, (a Japanese home robot) monitors and autonomously helps people. Apps are being developed for this and many other such innovations that are rapidly advancing the technology.
Such capabilities, however, only become possible when product and service makers imagine, anticipate and virtually simulate how they can leverage the capabilities of devices, made by others, to improve their user’s experiences. The key to this way of thinking is to put the user at the centre of the solution’s reason for being – which is the essence of the experience economy
The sensor-rich world of the IoT greatly expands the behavioural and contextual data available to shape and deliver personalised experiences to everyone. By enabling devices to share data and to evolve as user’s needs and demands change, organisations that aspire to the Internet of Experiences will greatly enrich the value they can deliver.