B1 (Future Jobs and AI): Skill-XR: An Affordable and Scalable X-Reality (XR) Platform for Skills Training and Analytics in Manufacturing Workforce Education

The broader impact and potential societal benefits of the SkillXR Convergence Accelerator Phase II project are training, pre- and upskilling, remote skilling, and enabling new insights in the manufacturing and education sectors. There is a multiplier effect on job growth in the national economy through expansions in manufacturing. As jobs and skills change and evolve, retraining and upskilling will become necessary steps towards economic sustainability, more importantly so as we recover during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the SkillXR platform is to disrupt current modes of workforce development by eliminating the current need for expensive software development and consulting intermediaries to create and maintain augmented, virtual and mixed reality (XR) applications. Through our partnerships within the small and large manufacturing industry and workforce education, we will transition the future workforce from acquisition of apprenticeships to real-world profitable skills in emerging industries over the next decade. Our focused partnerships with small businesses, minority entrepreneurs, play museums, and rural education promotes equitable access. The general-purpose nature of SkillXR will amplify the impact beyond our initial planned manufacturing education area to become ubiquitous across many other fields including robotics, construction, plant operations, education, and eventually everyday spatial cognitive assistance. Our pre-upskilling and learning analytics platform is planned to impact tens of thousands in five to six years and millions within a decade. Rural communities especially will benefit, as manufacturing represents twice the amount of earnings there, versus non-rural areas.

The highly interdisciplinary team brings knowledge spanning manufacturing, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), spatial interfaces and interactions, learning sciences, learning analytics, cognitive psychology, and visual gamified interfaces. We will collaborate closely with key partners using a design-research driven convergence framework to develop and transform research-based prototypes into products and services to impact our skilled workforce and economy. The two sides of our emerging product platform will (1) enable the authoring of AI-based XR personalized training applications by subject matter experts (coaches, teachers, trainers), without the need for prior knowledge in programming or sophisticated applications, and (2) a low-cost AI-based hardware approach to get personalized user analytics of tasks ?on-the-job? for scalable workforce assessment and optimization. Our approach permits extreme flexibility for various industrial use cases, reusability through plug-and-play for millions of applications, as well as tracking end-user spatial and performance analytics across time. By combining both basic and applied research our team will develop several high-fidelity collaborative cloud-based architectures, and a series of reconfigurable and widely applicable workflows.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.