LiveWorx is PTC’s annual showcase of its partners and product offerings. The popular event usually takes place in the Boston Seaport, just minutes from PTC’s penthouse headquarters. With celebrity guests, an energetic emcee, and high production keynotes, if LiveWorx can’t get you hyped about design and manufacturing, nothing can.
This year, the opening keynote was a tad less flashy than normal:
Live many conferences this year, PTC LiveWorx 2020 was reimagined as a virtual event. PTC executives, partners, and guests delivered their presentations not from podiums in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center but from webcams in home offices.
PTC and the New Normal
The opening speaker at every LiveWorx is PTC’s charismatic President and CEO, Jim Heppelmann. While he didn’t have the usual backing of lighting, music, and esteemed on-stage partners, Heppelmann still managed to hammer on the same themes he hits every LiveWorx: IoT. AR. Cloud. Automation. Digital transformation.
This year, however, Heppelmann had the unique opportunity to frame his themes around a global crisis that has emphatically proven their value. Heppelmann structured his keynote around four skills he considers necessary for the new normal: workforce mobility and resiliency, flexible and innovative supply chains, frontline workforce connectivity and collaboration, and remote monitoring of products and factories.
With so many now forced to work from home, Heppelmann believes that cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) has proven its value for a mobile (read: stuck at home) workforce. Heppelmann pointed out that PTC’s Windchill PLM platform is leading the way in cloud PLM and has been for years. Be that as it may, the new star of PTC’s SaaS portfolio is, of course, the company it acquired last October for $470 million: Onshape.
“Frankly, our timing on the Onshape acquisition could not have been better,” Heppelmann remarked.
Former Onshape CEO and current PTC President of SaaS Jon Hirschtick expounded on Heppelmann’s vision in a keynote called “SaaS: The Architecture for the New Normal” alongside Mike Campbell, General Manager of AR for PTC. Hirschtick and Campbell extolled the benefits of SaaS: it’s collaborative, it’s accessible, it’s easier to learn, it’s immediate, it’s scalable, it’s safe, and it lowers time and cost, they said.
If anyone would know the value of SaaS, it’s Hirschtick. The former CEO of SOLIDWORKS co-founded Onshape to pursue his strong belief in the future of cloud-based SaaS. PTC bought into that belief to the tune of $470 million, and now it’s structuring all of its present and future SaaS offerings on top of Onshape’s core cloud architecture. The company is branding this SaaS platform “Atlas.” According to Heppelmann, it will carry PTC’s SaaS applications on its shoulders.
It’s clear from both Heppelmann’s and Hirschtick’s keynotes that PTC will continue investing heavily in the SaaS model. According to Hirschtick, PTC is currently working to bring generative design (introduced in the latest Creo release) and Vuforia Enterprise onto Atlas’ shoulders. If this means we’ll see generative design integrated into Onshape, then color me excited.
Augmented Humans
Following Hirschtick’s standard Onshape spiel, Mike Campbell gave an overview of PTC’s Vuforia AR suite. He topped it off with a live demonstration of Vuforia Chalk, a real-time AR collaboration platform that he memorably described as “FaceTime on steroids.” Back when the pandemic first broke out, PTC began offering Vuforia Chalk for free as a way to help stranded workers navigate the new normal. According to Campbell, thousands of companies have embraced that offer, which stands until August 31.
PTC has been pursuing AR for years, and for LiveWorx 2020 the company brought in the perfect AR hype woman: Helen Papagiannis, augmented reality expert and author of “Augmented Human: How Technology is Shaping the New Reality.” In her keynote presentation, Papagiannis explored the ways AR is being used for visualization, annotation, and storytelling across the entire human sensorium.
“The line between the virtual and physical world is blurring very quickly,” Papagiannis asserted.
She backed up that claim quite strongly with a round of “Real or AR?” in which she showed viewers images and asked us if we could identify whether they were real or virtual. Try it out for yourself:
Are those images real, or generated in augmented reality? No need for an answer key, because all four of them are AR. If you called it right, give yourself a pat on the back. If you’re sad that’s not a real burger, join the club. The AR images are from Google AR Stickers (1), Kabaq App (2), Mimic XR (3), and Met Museum (4).
Emotional AI
My favorite presentation from LiveWorx 2020 was given by Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of artificial emotional intelligence company Affectiva. Affectiva uses deep learning to analyze human facial expressions and detect emotions.
If that sounds creepy, well, it is kind of creepy. But el Kaliouby wants the technology to help humans interact with their devices the same way they interact with other humans. For example, it could be used to gauge how an audience is responding during a virtual keynote. The technology behind Affectiva can also help doctors quantify mental health and suicide risk, help autistic individuals learn social cues, and help in the early detection of Parkinson’s disease.
And yes, it can also be used to make advertisements more effective. By testing audience reactions to over 50,000 ads around the world, Affectiva has determined that US viewers get the most enjoyment out of pet care and baby care ads. In my home and native land of Canada, our favorite type of ad is for cereal (don’t ask me why).
This is where things start to feel creepy for me, but el Kaliouby revealed a clear commitment to user privacy and consent—she tells the story of Affectiva turning down a 40 million dollar contract that would have seen the technology used for lie detection.
A Virtual Success
Though I missed the salty seaside air of Boston and the chance to socialize with the usual LiveWorx crowd, I have to give PTC credit for pulling off an engaging virtual conference. Every presentation I saw was compelling and without technical hiccup—an impressive feat, as I’m sure every Teams user can readily attest.
One of the benefits of a virtual conference is that all the presentations are available online. To see any of the keynotes discussed in this article, or any of the 100+ on-demand sessions, check out liveworx.com. Make sure to check out the keynote from Kimberly Bryant, founder and CEO of Black Girls Code, about how her non-profit organization has responded to COVID-19, and the keynote from author and entrepreneur Nir Eyal about how to hook users on a product.