Interview by https://www.geospatialworld.net/
Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides businesses with collaborative 3D virtual environments to imagine sustainable innovations. They have their presence in more than 140 countries across Aerospace & Defense, Transportation & Mobility, Life Sciences and Energy & Materials.
“By creating virtual experience twins of the real world with our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and applications, our customers push the boundaries of innovation, learning and production”
Through the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, it enables sustainable innovations to harmonize product, nature and life, especially for new age entrepreneurs who are dedicated to building solutions with a purpose.
In 2015, the company launched 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, to shape a new framework of open innovation that merges collective intelligence with a cross-collaborative approach. With a strong community of Entrepreneurs, makers and innovators, Dassault Systèmes is contributing towards building a community of intelligent, creative and passionate people.
“Dassault Systemes is the only innovation lab accelerating virtual twins globally. In India, we have partnered with NITI Aayogto help innovators and entrepreneurs under Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) in new domains like electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure, medical devices, energy & materials sector, and innovators providing sustainable solutions for industry of the future”, says Frederic Vacher, Head of Innovation, 3DEXPERIENCE Lab at Dassault Systèmes.
Tell us about your work in sustainable innovation, and what are your plans for 2022?
The current models of production and consumption have put critical pressure on natural resources. To address this time-sensitive crisis, we need to visualize products and production in a radically different manner. As per the Financial Times Focus Report by Dassault Systèmes, 61% of respondents stated that the increased development of sustainable products and services would require substantial business-model change. To achieve the UN Global Goals by 2030, incremental change is no longer an option, and the need of the hour is to make exponential changes in our approach. Virtual Twin technology is an underutilized lever to meet Sustainable Development Goals, and we are constantly leveraging it to accelerate the transformation towards sustainability.
While we are working closely with customers across industries, we are also empowering startups and entrepreneurs to create sustainable innovations, through our accelerator program, especially in transportation and mobility, and healthcare. 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is mentoring a portfolio of more than 50 startups, among them some unique innovations are listed below :
– Clean Sea Solutions, Norway, which develops an autonomous drone equipped with mapping sensors that is capable of removing plastic waste from the surface of the water or just below it in ports, canals and estuaries.
– Futura Gaïa, France, which proposes vertical farms in rotating geoponic installed in rehabilitated buildings in peri-urban areas
– GalaxyFCT, Malaysia, which is developing an on-demand hydrogen production system that is transformed into a solid state to optimize its transport and storage.
– PadCare, India, which is developing a circular economy approach focused on turning used sanitary napkins into packaging materials, plastic bricks, or fuel derived from waste.
By being a part of our 3DEXPERIENCE Lab program, startups are testing, improving their breakthrough ideas without risk, and streamlining the value creation process to reduce emissions and waste.
While virtual twin technology opens up new possibilities for Life Sciences and healthcare, Life Sciences companies can advance their sustainability journey with powerful and scientific, virtualization tools to model and optimize real-world processes and products.
At CES 2022, you displayed a volumetric light experience which included 3D virtual twin of visitor’s head. It seems to be a a cutting-edge technology for the healthcare sector. Tell us more about it ?
Our main booths at CES 2022 were focused on demonstrating our Living Heart and Living Brain Projects, allowing visitors to experience their own virtual twin and participate in mock clinical trials. Through these interactive and immersive experiences, we wanted to help visitors understand the next horizon in life sciences and healthcare – that it’s possible to visualize, test and even predict surgical outcomes or the way drugs affect a disease. The visitors experienced live mirror images of their head and heart, and the virtual twin mirrored the movements of the visitors before dissolving into a data cloud.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is helping create a virtual twin experience of the human body, offering a space where modelling, simulation, information intelligence and collaboration are integrated to advance and transform understanding of human life. This virtual visualization of a patient’s organ is helping researchers, doctors and academia, to virtually test multiple surgical options and decipher safest and precise treatment.
Our Eureka park booth was a virtual world where people could be immersed and discover all our projects virtually. We, at Dassault Systèmes, are trying to take seemingly small but firm steps towards carbon neutrality (if not positivity) by bringing this virtual 3DEXPERIENCE Lab to CES 2022. We want to limit the carbon impact of startups physically flying to the venue, in addition to burning fuel while community by road to reach airports, using plastic tokens, access cards, Styrofoam coffee cups, and so on. We are proud to host them in the virtual environment powered by the cloud 3DEXPERIENCE Platform.
The virtual twin technology will further help in designing custom implants and single-use patient specific instrumentation for complex surgeries. Data Science is now open to more possibilities with the health data now being tracked. Machine learning combined with virtual twin could allow for predictive healthcare. In a short span of time, the Virtual twin technology has made strides in some ground-breaking work by medical representatives across the world, including startups in India. One such start-up is BrainSightAI which creates AI-based diagnostic tools that can help in functional investigation of the brain. They have been using our 3DEXPERIENCE® Platform for leveraging the AI-based software which helps in diagnosing mental disorders using MRI scans and helps neurosurgeons in pre-surgical planning especially for comatose or cognitively challenged patients.
What are your plans to engage with startups to foster innovation ?
To partner with the startups on their innovation journey, Dassault Systèmes has been engaging with them through growth and learning opportunities. We appreciate the new energy, enthusiasm and sense of purpose that Indian startups are bringing to the ecosystem. With the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, India has a huge potential to further innovation from these new-age entrepreneurs. Startups are driven by cost efficiency and committed to having a quick go-to-market strategy, where our 3DEXPERIENCE Lab becomes a partner! Startups are able to access the on-cloud as well on-premise SaaS and PaaS platform that includes apps, collaboration tools, cloud computing resources, and specialized user communities to work on their products.
