Phygital convergence

The real and virtual worlds don’t have to be two separate domains. Steve Cassidy crosses the bridge

The word “convergence” gets bandied about a lot – what are we talking about here? It’s true, when techies use the word “convergent” it can mean almost anything. You might conceivably say that Mozilla and the internet “converged” to produce the World Wide Web. Personally I’m more troubled by “phygital”, a horrible train crash of a term which really just means something we’ve all been doing with computers for decades – connecting a digital model in software to a physical thing. So is this primarily about design and manufacturing? It can relate to any physical resource or emplacement, such as a threshing machine, an oil tanker or a bridge over an angry river. Think of phygital as attaching a digital sidecar to a real thing – to track, store, expose and process information…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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