Elizabeth Baron to share experiences from Ford Motor and other companies on using immersive technologies during product development 

March 25, 2019 -- The COFES Institute announces that Elizabeth Baron, founder of Immersionary Enterprises, will deliver a keynote titled Immersive Product Verification: Storytelling for collaborative design and engineering at COFES 2019 to be held in Silicon Valley (Menlo Park, CA) April 7-10, 2019. 

Immersive technology is described in  Wikipedia as technology that attempts to emulate a physical world through the means of a digital or simulated world, thereby creating a sense of immersion. “When applied to product development this technology is a game-changer,” said Elizabeth Baron. “We are on the edge of a whole new way to invent products, which allows people to experience their ideas virtually. These virtual environments go well beyond interactive scenes to include real science and engineering data.” 

“Design is a team endeavor. Immersive collaborations allow teams (large or small) to actively participate and contribute. With the immersive approach, it is much easier to engage people with different technology experience, which aligns perfectly with the COFES 2019 theme of convergence,” said Baron. “I will review

how the immersive realities use digital data created from various sources to understand the multiple functions of a product simultaneously."

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, this year’s COFES theme is the convergence of technologies and the software implications for design and engineering. Convergence is happening quickly. These technologies present tremendous opportunities for the products and buildings of tomorrow. However, design teams are struggling to keep up. Converging technologies such as Additive Manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality, Generative Design, IoT, Machine Learning and Cloud computing, enable possibilities that were not even imagined before … creating a new reality for design teams. 

The need to effectively design in this new reality will become increasingly more important. There is a gap today. Companies are dealing with convergence with brute force. The software tools to manage the expanded, evolving design process do not exist yet. It is the mission of COFES to examine this need from a software perspective and to serve our various constituents from end-users to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to investors to industry analysts. 

About Elizabeth Baron 

Elizabeth Baron is the founder of Immersionary Enterprises (IE). She has been the driving force in the development and deployment of global, collaborative immersive paradigms for industrial design and engineering. She formed IE to apply creative and elegant immersive solutions for enterprise that create synergy between knowledge and experience for cross-functional teams. Formerly, Elizabeth was a Technical Specialist in Immersive Realities at Ford Motor Company. She is the principal inventor of the Ford Immersive Vehicle Environment (FiVE) process and technology, an immersive environment with high realism in experience, providing contextual data and real time global immersion for multiple disciplines across Ford. She then expanded FiVE to combine the physical and virtual worlds, creating location-based actionable immersive storytelling in Design Studios.