I don’t think that China will remain the global manufacturing hub

Living Tomorrow is a remarkable spot in Flanders. It is a wormhole to the future, where visitors can discover which technologies will make our lives easier in the years to come. Not surprisingly, Industry 4.0 has a key role. CEO Joachim De Vos explains how Living Tomorrow came into being, and how the centre not only showcases the evolutions in Industry 4.0, but also helps to shape them.

“Living Tomorrow came into being a quarter of a century ago. The year 2000 was approaching, and people felt very unsure about the future. The centre wanted to address this issue and clarify how emerging technologies would be used in our daily lives. Today, Living Tomorrow is a kind of Living Lab, a discovery platform that presents the story of the future.

But we want to do more than just show the future. We also want to prepare for it. That happens inside Tomorrow Lab, where we work together with companies, organizations, governments, cities, and municipalities. For them too, it is often difficult to imagine how the future will evolve and how best to respond to it.”

A world first in digital twins

“Digital twins is an Industry 4.0 issue that many of our partners are dealing with. We apply it ourselves in the Building Innovation Modelling system, which entails creating a complete digital model of your building in 3D. You then add dynamic data to it with the help of real-time sensors in the real world. For example, we’re scanning buildings with drones to see how we can improve the insulation. Drones also conduct safety scans, for example, checking where dangerous objects are and where people are at risk on site.

Cameras provide information about which windows lack insulation, and how this can be fixed. This information is all fed into the model, so it becomes a digital twin of your building. All partners working on the building receive automatic feedback to optimize their systems and to produce better ones.

Living Tomorrow has even achieved a world first in the field of digital twins for product design. As part of the Future Vision project, we have created a hologram table that allows manufacturers to design and test products virtually. You actually see your product appear, and then you can read out all the data.

We are also working hard on service robots. For example, together with Mercedes, we’re looking at how we can work with brainwaves in the AVTR [Mercedes’ car of the future]. Not to control the car – because the AVTR is intended to drive completely autonomously within ten years – but to control the entertainment functions. So, we’re looking for completely new interfaces in the car of the future. Because it will no longer be necessary to pay attention to the road, we will have a lot of free time in this kind of mobility cocoon.”

In search of the ideal digital interaction

“Conferences play a key role in bringing together ideas and companies. They provide an enormous amount of inspiration. This year, for example, we are organizing a conference with Ghent University Hospital and the Belgian army, at which we will translate military medical innovations into practice for civil patients like you and me.

Many conferences are now a hybrid of physical attendance and video meetings, and I feel that a certain fatigue has set in. People don’t just attend conferences to learn, they also want to network. At Living Tomorrow, we’re looking for the ideal digital interaction. Why should we still be thinking about mega-conferences with thousands of visitors? We’re considering this question with a group that has hotels in almost every country in the world. If you can connect these hotels virtually, with say 200 people per hotel, then you can also bring ten thousand people together. Using holographic projection, you can give people the feeling that the speaker is present. Demonstrations can be experienced in 3D, partly by personalizing them for each country. That way, people don’t have to travel thousands of kilometres to hear six speakers, and  it’s much easier to organize.”

In the past, you needed a mega factory to produce a million items, otherwise you couldn’t make a profit. These mega factories were built in low-wage countries. But I don’t think that countries like China will remain the world’s manufacturing hub. With the evolution towards personalized production, local production will become important once again. Which implies that the ownership of raw materials will also remain local. They will be reprocessed, because it must all happen in a circular way. And that is exactly what we excel at in the Western world. That creates enormous opportunities for our region to become a world player once more.”