Nicolas Waern with EDX Technologies

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Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get all right.

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Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Once again, this is a platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world because you're both great and dare greatly I say it all the time. But I do. I geek out on the fact that you industry professionals are just absolutely changing lives, changing the world. And I love celebrating and I love learning from you guys. We are broadcasting from Austin, Texas on site right now, right this very moment. And it is the O M G meeting. And it is a collection of problem solvers like Nick right next to me, that are passionate about solving problems, identifying them and making our lives. You don't even know how much they impact your life. You don't I just want to live because I just sit there and soak it up like a sponge. Nick's in the hot seat. Let's get cracking. on Nick. Hey, what's up? What's up? Yeah, you're the hero in this story. EDX Technologies. I have to Isetta? Is that an acronym for something or does it? I mean, you got the EDX Technologies.com which is pretty doggone cool. Yeah. As

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EDX Technologies.org is not completely covid.org. It's not to be confused. with.org Because that's the indication port, right? So this is like, oh EDX Technologies have heard about that? Well, we've not that EDX Technologies. So EDX Technologies is actually you know, a merger between Is that okay?

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It's like I was, I was more dazzled. Yeah. I’ve come to the conclusion that every URL was taken up. Yeah. And then now you get this, but and so you got this EDXTech.com. And,

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yeah, it's pretty good, right? Nobody in because they've been in business for two decades. It's harder between EDX Technologies technologies which more like the XR marketplace, you know, all these kind of buzzword bingo real time data. But then two years, two decades of legacy and wireless planning, radio frequency planning and telecoms, industry, 5g 60 all this

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stuff just popped into g 60s.

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For the Hi Fi, you know, what is it a pathway to Hi Fi holographic societies, right. So I'm really I liked that stuff. But you know, in the real world, sometimes. I'm also you know, the co chair of the manufacturing group at the digital twin Consortium. So that's a little bit why I'm here, you know, to provide that insight. You're here because you

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get to sort of collaborate with everybody, and everybody's just dreaming about the next thing. You're chasing that shiny object. Yeah. When somebody popped in and said, Hey, Scott, I want to be I want to talk to you about six years ago. I just got a phone that says 5g right now. And now you're talking six g and and but that's going to happen to

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No, no, but I definitely think that they are, you know, these kind of working groups that are important to drive this forward. But I think the challenge is also this is, you know, happening behind almost closed doors.

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It is.

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I mean, that's that's what exactly what is happening. Right. And that's it's sort of challenging for me to put it in a diplomatic way. Because you know, you have people getting educated, the education that people are getting, also the format that they're getting that education is the same way that has happened basically forever, right. And also what they've been educated in is 20 years, 30 years away from what is at the cutting edge of what we're working with today. So the gap in where the market is how we educate people for the market, and also what is at the cutting edge. It's like three decades, right? And that's my passion. My passion is just to bring these things together so that the people are getting educated and not getting sucked in to how we work today, but actually preparing them for how we need to work tomorrow.

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Do.

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Does that make sense?

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No, I'm getting the proper question. Yeah. Because I always struggle with that. Do you think the, the typical Education Institute is nimble enough to deal with this velocity, of course, not. Seeing that, that, to me, brings a lot of stress because because it impacts it impacts every facet of our lives. If you're if we're not preparing the next gen, people to understand what's taking place and to be able to be passionate about it, then we're struggling. Yeah, we're

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perpetuating obsolescence that way, that is completely a good way, you know, ridiculous. And I think like, you know, VR, a our modern ways of collaborating, we need to use that in order to get the message across much, much easier, right. I think one of my this is one of my favorite topics actually got passionately irritated yesterday, because I've been investigating this for the last, I don't know, 15 years, and my ambition is to, has been to solve all problems in the world, and also operate in all countries of the world, right? That's been, you know, a little bit of an obsession of mine, and also find the most critical problems and you know, how can we solve these faster. And what is evident is that when we bring the right people together, give them the right information. And, you know, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and what NASA did, we in terms of extreme collaboration, we can actually get stuff done without any AI machine learning, just getting the right people together, and for them to work together continuously, or, like in concurrent collaborations, like together at the same time, that's when we can solve problems 99% faster. So I think like not understanding the mechanism behind that, and you know, providing the right information at the right time to the right people, that is really, really important. And I don't, I don't think we do a great job of that. And it can change institutions, right, because we have reality. And then we crash reality. And we make abstracts of reality, and we divide it into domains, or subjects, and then you specialize, you know, for 10 years into something. So you become really, really good at something. But you're really, really bad at understanding anything else. So we'll live in a broken world today. And I think that's the stuff that I think we can mend with having these digital twins, when we you know, taking real time data, and providing that in a way with a visual understanding that represents reality. So that means that we were not looking at some historic events, through Excel sheets that maybe a few people can understand, we're actually looking at something where we can have industry experts, we can have seven year olds, 18 year olds, we can have, you know, CEOs, marketing people, industry professionals actually look at the same stuff, but from different perspectives. And then when we change something, if there's digital twin, we're not doing that in the real world. But we're doing that in a representation of the real world. So that means that we can try stuff out, we can wreck stuff, we can be wrong, we can you know, blow stuff up? And then okay, maybe we shouldn't do that. Oh, great, right, because we're not doing this in the real world, we're doing that in a dev environment for the real world. So I think that's the benefit of having these digital twins to be able to, you know, transfer that knowledge from the people that know stuff, to the ones that want to know, and, you know, have that entry level understanding, okay, I don't understand exactly, you know, the complex stuff. But I can see that when we do this stuff here, it actually changing something in the real world. And I want to know more, because I understand that it's a visual representation, it's in 3d, and 3d, you know, for some people, it's like, you know, we just need to D, we just need this kind of stuff. Well, that is true for industry experts. But if you want to, you know, enter a new area, and, you know, the way that we go to work, the way that we operate the way that we're talking right now, you're in 3d, right. So I think that's also you know, it's a little bit convoluted to talk, maybe in a podcast, but you know, the way that we, you know, surf reality is always in 3d, always. And, you know, the way that we've been taught, again, going back to academic institution is that we've been trained, and, you know, brainwashed or conditioned into thinking, well, we're going to abstract reality. And then we're going to try to have these domain tools to try to attack this in another silo. And then at some point may be, we're going to try to bring it back to reality, and see if it works. It doesn't, right. So we live in a broken environment. So my ambition has been to, you know, go back to reality, you know, stay there, and, you know, provide a dev environment to that part of the world that we're trying to improve and actually get that stuff done. So for digital twins, for me are, you know, a fantastic tool. It's an enabler for people and systems to actually work together to reach you know, whatever problems that needs to be solved much, much, much faster than what we've done before.

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Yeah. And the ability to simulate whatever exactly it was. That didn't work. And nobody dies as a result of that. Yeah, exactly. We're in a, you know, a digital twin environment, but it's great. And absolutely, and when you nail when you nail that digital twin down, then you can bring it into reality, and you're feeling exactly level of competence is off the charts. Yeah, I think that I don't think we should call gloss over it. I think the world is complex. It just is. And it just and and again, there's the speed associated with that complexity. And the only way that I know how to deal with it, and I know that you probably have more answers than I do, but we don't have all the answers. And the only way that we can do that is through a collaborative as a willingness to collaborate environment now, right here, and being able to do that, and, and, and remove the politics from, from that conversation from that collaboration and really solve problems. Yeah, I think that that's the only way that

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we're going to do it. And I'm really surprised because that's what you said initially, right? You know, helping people solve problems, usually when I say that, that we can use technology to solve problems, people looked at me, like I'm crazy, because usually want to use technology to make more money, you know, grab the customer love them into whatever solutions that they have all this kind of stuff, right. But I just gotta give an example. That maybe makes sense, you know, what we do with EDX Technologies. So again, we have this global digital twin, so think Googler, we, you know, have real time data from satellites. So we allow municipalities, companies subscribe to their part of the world. So keep that up to date. So now they have a 3d representation. You know, where trees are, where buildings are, where everything is, that is up to date. So that allows you to have a good Canvas to try stuff out. So for us specializing wireless planning, knowing that, you know, we're going to Austin or any new city on the planet, we have the digital twin, that is given kept up to date as a canvas. And then we can take in a local drone surveyors to keep that even more up to date, granular information of everything. But then the digital twin comes in this simulation capabilities. And we asked the digital twin that okay, how do we get to 100%, 5g connectivity in the city? That's the question. And then the digital twin makes the computations, the simulations know what trees are, where buildings are, you feed in, you know, Nokia, Ericsson, whatever vendor that you're looking at. And then the digital twin shows you, you know, you go outside in augmented reality, and you can see, it's green everywhere, there are no gaps, you get 100% connectivity. And then you can also see where the cell towers are placed, you know, their own buildings, all this kind of stuff, depending on if it's 4g, 5g, whatever, you know, deep level of density that you need to have. So that you know that that's how you let the digital twin engine work for you. And you simulate this. So the municipalities, the integrators, installers, they know exactly what it's going to cost. They know exactly what it's going to be. And then when they install it, it's the skill shortage gap, right? Because these people that are really, really good at doing this, they're getting older, they are, you know, maybe not attractive, the younger ones, maybe not attracted to go into this industry. So again, you have this skill shortage gap, which is basically in every industry. Yeah, everything's good. So but if you do this, then you can put on a HoloLens. So if you're an installer, well, you know exactly where it's going to be, you know exactly what it's going to look like. And because you also visualize in an operation, when you turn it on, is basically matching what you're already seeing with what's happening. So that's something like, it's the benefit of having digital twins, that you're simulating this, you making it ready both for people to understand what's going on. So that's why you have the visual representation represent reality. And then also you have like the backend, you know, the advanced computation, the models, the simulations, all this kind of stuff. So that, for me, is a really, really good example, because it's unobtrusive to reality. You try out stuff in a virtual environment represent reality. And then you can make decisions, knowing how much it's going to cost, etc, etc. And then once you turn it on, that's actually when it becomes the digital twin before, it's just a prototype digital twin. But now when you feed it real time data from the network, we have a visual representation. That's how we can visualize 200,000 cell towers in real time to see what actually goes on with the network. Right. So he's basically from planning, to installation to operation as well as to decommissioning. So you have that circular, right because you have all the information, and you bring that with you forever. Today, most of the world is fragmented. Solutions, don't talk to each other people don't talk to each other, you lose so much knowledge at every step of the turn. So at the end, you don't really know what has happened. You can't do anything about it, you don't know anything. So that's again the power of digital tools to provide meaningful information for systems as well as people at the same time. And you know, when I say systems and people I mean of all ages, whether that's you know, old system, I old person, a young person, domain expert, Are, we need to be able to create an entry point for people to understand the complex reality that we're in, and then engage and dig deeper with domain experts. That's what I believe.

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You know, you're, you're hitting on a lot of cylinders there. And I like it. The challenge I have, in my mind, of course, is the is the is the where, where do I start? Everything, everything is like, everything is a challenge, right? Everything is an opportunity. And in that opportunity, there's a solution, there's might be problem. But it's, it's, it's the ability because you want to be able to focus on the right things. And it has to be, from my perspective, sort of, if you look at it from a macro point of view, it's overwhelming. It's like, oh, my gosh, I What do I do? Where do I go? Oh, I just like I haven't melt down. But if you're if you've got the ability to say, Okay, we're going to be here, we're going to incrementally just sort of succeed, and then just continue to scale in a way of that makes sense. That's the only way that I know because you're absolutely right, you you're just like, oh my gosh, I

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love what you're seeing. And that's a classic promo digital twins, you know how to get started? Why do you do it? How much is gonna cost? Right? Yeah.

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And what problem are you solving? I don't know, what am I? Have? I've owned this property forever? Why do I need to digitize it? I know where the age back is. I know what the lights are.

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Exactly. And I think it's, you know, it's related to, you know, saving money, of course, making more money and making you money. Yeah, that's what like from the business perspective, but I think like, you know, it's a good question as in how to get started. For me, it's a little bit the other way around, I zoom out to basically the whole planet. But then when engaging with customers, or whatever it might be you exactly what you said, right? You assume in to the production plant, you look at exactly what are we talking about, because it's so easy to get fluffy, you know, to not understand what you're talking about, you get right into industry jargon. It's really problematic. So I think like the starting point, again, what the digital twin is solving is to provide a shared reality for people. So again, let's just take an example. We have a production manufacturing plant, that might be similar, but it also very unique, and what are the products that they have, what kind of year, you know, what kind of solutions that they have, what kind of MES systems what kind of actual physical, you know, product. So basically, what you want to do, in my opinion, is that you scan everything. So it becomes in 3d. And that's when you take a discussion. So you take a discussion, not with the industry experts, but actually with the ones that are on the factory floor for them to, you know, transfer the knowledge that they have about the systems in a way that makes sense for them, that we then can engage industry experts, and then we can say, okay, knowing this, you know, the way that you explained when I'm over here, you know, by the station, I encountered this problem, or when I did this over here, this is a problem. So I think like it's the I don't know, we probably know what Kaizen methodology, all this kind of stuff. So I think it's just taking that more into digital realm. And that enables the ability to invite to innovate so that others experts, and MES systems or in IoT, or industrial IoT, or digital twinning or cybersecurity, they're engaging with that company within the same reality, right? So they can provide their expertise, knowing what the problem is, because I think that's something that we usually lack not defining the problem is just defining what is the world job not to be done? What is the job that is, is being done? That has to be the starting point. So if you define the jobs, you know, not to be done, what is the job that is being done in a way that everyone can understand? That is the starting point that doesn't have to do with IoT, that doesn't have to do with anything, it's just providing that shared reality? And then you can add different layers.

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So here's the funny thing. And I'm thinking through this, right, yeah. And there's just inefficiency. This property is losing money someplace, it's always a way of being able to say, hey, let's make it more efficient by managing power, whatever, whatever it is, there's always inefficiency. But once you perfect it, let's say you take this property, nail it, right, and everything is just spinning and having a grand time and you've already achieved the values, the savings, then all of a sudden, it just it's like it just operates Yep. But there's no there's no more savings. It's like you've you've just That's That's an extreme Yeah, but you're solving

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is solved every everything making a self learning building you have like batteries or solar power, it's sort of like generates itself and then you know, we have building automation equipment and sensor so we basically adapt to people that are in there. So it's like perfect indoor air quality. When we went to the building, you have your own sensor so like whenever I go into a hotel, I want to have a Celsius like 21 degrees, right? And then everything adapts accordingly all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it is like okay for there. Yeah, exactly. No, no,

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no and you don't know. Yeah.

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I think that's exactly the point that you made in the beginning. You know, this all this stuff I like to talk about right the technology in the XR, the interoperability in the IoT. Yeah, fantastic. But from a user, it should just work. It should be seamless, seamless. Yeah, it should be extremely seamless. But one other dimension. I think, you know, it's right now, no one is wearing smart glasses, right? Yeah, basically, no one I want. So in order to engage in finding Pokemon, we put up our phone. We use it like no NDA, in front of us. But very, very soon, sooner than I think most people would think it we see we have the HoloLens, we have new medic quest Pro, we're going to have smart glasses, your glasses are smart, mine are smart, but not that smart. Right? They look smart. But that's, that's all. That's all there is. So when we have smart glasses and dialogue engines, that means that we can engage with reality in different ways. Right? Yeah, nobody, this isn't cooling. This is a cool example. So if you tie that to heating, ventilation, air conditioning, right? Today, as a user, I can't affect that in the cold rooms that are here, right? Super cold, too cold. But if we will have that in augmented reality, I can connect it to the heating ventilation air conditioning system, I can provide, you know, visibility into what is invisible, because I know the flow of air that is coming down, right. So I simulate that. And I also also visualize that simulation. So when I go into the room, I can basically see, you know, air streaming down, and I'm sitting down somewhere, and I just like, like, you know, a lamp, I grabbed ahold of the augmented reality part, I did that push it up, because I don't want air, I don't want that cold air to hit my head. So I just grabbed hold of the air, and I push it up. And that instantaneously is connected to the heater installation air conditioning system. So now I overwritten, you know, a manual override of the heating ventilation air conditioning system. And again, that's just making, you know, this more seamless and you for me, as a user, I just you know, this'll this will happen. I just take it, and it's there. And then I can just you know, enjoy. You know, the topic, right? See?

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Isn't that pretty cool? Oh, it is. Like I in I think the icing on the cake is it will happen? Yeah, of course.

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And we can make it up in now. Right? Say, yeah.

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How did he get a hold of you? I'm sorry for the fact that that was a fun conversation. How do they get ahold of you?

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So for me, I mean, again, obsessed with solving all problems in the world for a very long time. I started working with digital twin construction two years ago, co chair manufacturing group been everywhere. And I just, you know, stick with it. I want to solve all problems. What's your email, so that he can contact you? It's Nicholas dots. word@EDX Technologies.com. So Nicholas, w e rn@EDX Technologies.com.

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We got to geek out to connect with this guy. That was fun conversation. I enjoyed that. Thank you, Nick. super interesting. It was fun. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for Nick out on industrial talk.com. You need it? Are you out on LinkedIn? Absolutely. There it is. Right there. We'll have his contact information there too, as well. So stay tuned, we will be right back.

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You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

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Again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. And thank you for your support. That was Nick EDX Technologies technology. And they're about adoption of augmented reality. Yes, you need to know about augmented reality, you need to know about how it will impact your business in a positive way. And the only way that I know how that'll happen is if you educate and you collaborate with people like Nick. Now, we were at, as you can tell, at q4 OMG, on this particular conversation, that is an organization that look you need to look into, to begin your journey into the world of augmented reality that that is happening. And I just cannot impress enough for unity to be a part of an organization that is doing that because it's going to impact your business, or your competition is going to be impacted by it. And you don't want that. You, you need to succeed. So that's why you need to reach out to Nick. It's all out on industrial talk.com, EDX Technologies technology, and all of the other great consortiums that exist under OMG. So put that on your calendar and get engaged and remember, educate, collaborate. And of course, you need to innovate. You need to do it. So anyway, thank you very much for joining again. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Nick and you're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation coming from this particular event shortly so stay tuned.