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Are market changes or customer demand affecting your product development, and if so, how?
Customer feedback is always being taken into account when planning future releases and features, by for example utilizing a user-centered-design approach. By keeping in close contact with our customers and distribution partners, this approach ensures that our products are designed in a way that can best serve our customers.
Is there a particular trend or product in the next few years that you see as “the next big thing?”
The machine vision industry is moving along an evolutionary approach rather than to be disruptive. For example, MVTec is working on topics like identification technologies for many years and still there is no general algorithm which automatically allows recognizing and measuring each and every object in an image. However, we are pushing the technical limits in this direction each time we release a new version of HALCON.
Do you have any new exciting products or developments on the horizon?
The roadmap of both of our products, HALCON and MERLIC, is full of exciting new ideas and developments. We see that embedded solutions in the B2B space featuring machine vision will get more and more importance.
As part of our 20th anniversary, we are taking a look back at the past 20 years, while also trying to predict where the industry will be in 20 years. Can you give a few predictions on some things you expect to happen within the near future, and what the industry might look like in 20 years?
Twenty years ago only a few people had mobile phones and none of these phones had a built-in camera. Today, many people have smartphones with integrated cameras and these phones can process images from the internal camera at a speed of what PCs did 20 years ago. This example shows that the technology develops very fast and also generates new business models.
In the near future, we will see that the digitization of many industrial processes will gain speed and that Industry 4.0 will be implemented into manufacturing. Machine vision is ready for these challenges and in particular will enable the success of Industry 4.0. Machine Vision will continue to be a technology-driven industry and will focus on the needs of our customer industry whether in the manufacturing sector or in the non-manufacturing sector. And if the manufacturing sector will get “closer” to our home, e.g. by means of 3D printing, machine vision still has to ensure that the quality of the printed parts is right. Whether this leads to super-integrated vision systems with local computational power, or to super-cloud processing all imaging data and learning from all this data, we don’t know yet. What we know is: working in the machine vision industry is a lot of fun and pretty exciting – and this will continue.
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