While AR plays catch-up in other sectors, it’s taking over the enterprise

An article by Amir Bozorgzadeh for Venture Beat discusses the trend for AR which is accelerating in the enterprise.  The author notes that the AR market is expected to overtake its older sibling VR in revenues by 2021 and argues that creators are in catchup mode.

The enterprise sector has already made very real strides whilst other sectors play catch up.  In the past two years, enterprise AR has graduated from experimental tinkering to become a validated implementation that is very much now a permanent best practice for industrial operations.

In other words, if you are a leading corporation and you don’t already have AR looped into your business lines, congratulations, you are a dinosaur, particularly because it will be vital in leveraging the advantages of adjacent technologies like IoT. Last week, for instance, a report released by PTC and the Aberdeen Group stated that 67 percent of the enterprise AR users surveyed pair it specifically with IoT in order to conduct remote repairs.

Enterprise AR has gone mainstream

“This can come in both the form of task itemization as well as see-what-I-see remote expert guidance scenarios. Some technology elitist/purist might claim this isn’t “true” AR, but I think of it as existing on a spectrum; with this use case easier to deploy *and* capable of demonstrating value for a wide variety of organizations.” Nguyen said.

Take again the Capgemini “Augmented and Virtual Reality in Operations”report that I showcased in my article on enterprise VR, which details a number of use cases in which AR consistently drives higher productivity and efficiency levels by allowing companies to streamline workflows for a wide variety of manual tasks.

Boeing’s technicians use AR instructions for airplane wiring schematics in their field of view, allowing them to be hands-free, which reduces wiring production time by 25 percent and increases productivity by 40 percent.

Welsh Water uses an AR layer to present process-oriented information and instructions such as direction information for valves and switches, or ideal operating ranges for gauges and dials, which minimizes risk and informs the decision-making process.

Ford utilizes AR tech by allowing designers and engineers to dynamically peruse through digital designs and parts as if they were part of a physical vehicle, reducing the time to analyze designs to a matter of hours or minutes.

Siemens enables their employees to inspect circuit boards by augmenting their view and alerting them to various elements they could have missed, which has hiked quality up by 20 to 25 percent.

GE Transportation’s Global Services group leveraged AR to drastically increase the number of maintenance tasks per hour by 59 percent by allowing workers to view maintenance instructions and sign-off tasks when performing maintenance on locomotives.

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