Topics covered in the summary:

• Ori Inbar’s traditional State of XR keynote
• Mike Campbell of PTC priorities for achieving AR at scale in the enterprise (especially manufacturing and service where AR has the greatest value)
• Juergan Lumera of Bosch and Wolfgang Stelzle of RE’FEKT on their joint journey to take a platform for delivering information to service techs from prototype to global roll-out.
• XR-enabled training seemed to be a key area for large-scale industrial XR deployments
• Tim Merel, Digi-Capital research with AWE – keytakeaways
• Dr. Fadi Chehimi of IBM
• Object Theory’s Michael Hoffman
• M. Pell and Charlie Fink
• Kornelius Brunner and Andreas Haizmann of TeamViewer

Finally the panel conversations from the day were covered.

The full roundup article is well worth a read for quick takeaways from this hugely inspiring and successful event.

The comprehensive research study and corresponding report identifies significant financial improvements realized by industrial companies embracing augmented reality (AR), and provides best practices for unlocking the potential of the technology across various environments.

In addition to the report published, PTC announced exclusive data from Aberdeen that shows that organizations using AR have experienced significant year-over-year business growth and have improved their bottom lines dramatically.

“The rapid pace of the global market, digital transformation, and increasing shortage of highly skilled workers have produced a disruptive threat for businesses,” said Tom Paquin, research analyst, Aberdeen Group. “However, as evidenced by our latest report with PTC, companies that invest in AR, particularly manufacturing and service organizations, have the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.”

For enterprises, AR can empower workers to understand and interact with the physical and digital worlds, build new skills with reduced training time and cost, and make informed decisions faster. As a result, businesses can unlock increased productivity and improve the effectiveness of training, manufacturing, and service.

“AR is one of the fastest growing segments in the technology market and has been shown to create significant business value for organizations adopting it. Industrial enterprises are keen to improve customer experiences, open up new revenue streams, and disrupt competition by leveraging the new AR capabilities for product and service differentiation,” said Jim Heppelmann, president and CEO, PTC. “Use cases being developed for end customers have a strong focus on service or maintenance instructions, enabling them to reduce machine downtime and maximize product value.”

Also in the press release are details from AWE Europe 2018

PTC and the topic of enterprise AR took center stage today (Oct 18 2018) at AWE Europe 2018, the world’s leading AR and VR conference and expo, held October 18-19 in Munich, Germany.

This morning, Mike Campbell, EVP, Augmented Reality Products, PTC, led a keynote session titled, “PTC Vision for Augmented Reality in the Enterprise,” in which he spoke about the state of AR in the industrial enterprise, reviewed customer use cases, and illustrated the power of AR to fundamentally change the way people work and to allow organizations to re-imagine how to manufacture, sell, operate, and service industrial products.

“Augmented reality can deliver a significant advantage for industrial organizations as part of their overall digital transformation,” said Mr. Campbell. “PTC customers are better leveraging existing investments in CAD, IoT, and digitalization of content through AR experiences, enabling people to visualize and interact with the digital world in the real-time context of their daily work.”

As a Titanium Sponsor of and exhibitor at the event, PTC is showcasing its latest AR solutions – Vuforia Studio, Vuforia Engine, and Vuforia Chalk – as well as distributing copies of the Aberdeen research report at booth 118. PTC is also participating in The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), which runs in conjunction with AWE Europe, in booth 405.

82% of companies currently implementing augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) say the benefits are either meeting or exceeding their expectations.

However, a shortage of in-house expertise and insufficient backend infrastructures are significant barriers to growth.

Drawing on responses from more than 700 executives in the automotive, manufacturing and utilities sectors found that 50% of enterprises currently not implementing AR and VR will start exploring immersive technologies for their business operations within the next three years.

These include using AR to remotely access real-time help from experts on a wearable or handheld device, and VR to train employees. Some 46% of companies believe the technology will become mainstream in their organisations within the next three years, while a further 38% think it will in the next three to five years.

The report found that companies in the US and China are currently leading the implementation race, with more than 50% of companies surveyed already implementing immersive technology for business operations.

Conversely, over 50% of companies in the UK, France, Germany, and the Nordics are still only experimenting with AR/VR initiatives.

As well as a number of short infograhpics, the articlecontains information about:

• The benefits of immersive technologies
• Most common use cases

The report identified a group of “early achievers” who are driving the most benefits from their immersive technology initiatives.

Image source: The Manufacturer, Smart Factory Expo

The article concludes with an invitation to Europe’s largest digital manufacturing event – Smart Factory Expo to be held on 14 – 15 November at the Exhibition Centre Liverpool, UK

The article then runs through the process a business would need to take in making decisions about where to start with the technology and how to progress through the journey.

To start with, it’s all about defining the most appropriate use cases around your existing business processes- and not trying to create problems to solve. It’s also about not fully buying in to the media hype that surrounds the technology, you need to make sure that your use cases are appropriate for today’s technologies. This will help align your business with the correct device and the correct ‘reality’.

Even if a suitable use case has been identified, you still need to get support from across your organisation. People need to be open to trying and using the different devices and types of reality, and thinking about how they could be used within various departments. It’s essential to get people on board in terms of buy-in. In engineering and manufacturing, many existing processes are so well established that even the slightest change to the status quo could cause resistance.

In the early stages it is best to be open minded and realistic as to what you want to achieve, and from a technology standpoint, be device agnostic. Today, nobody really knows which devices are best, or which will win out over time. New devices are appearing all the time and in 12 months’ time the next generation of devices will have hit the market.

So ultimately, the things you need to think about are:

• Don’t fully buy in to the media hype
• Be realistic as to what’s possible today-it will be different in 12 months’ time
• Define your use cases
• Don’t create problems to solve
• Get internal support
• Make sure you have infrastructure to support the devices
• Experiment with all devices – see which would suit your needs best. The type of device you choose will dictate the type of ‘reality’.
• Think short-term ROI as this market is new and evolving rapidly.

Although investing in new technologies like this can seem like a risk to begin with-especially if you’re not sure how they will fit in to your workplace-using AR, MR and VR in engineering and manufacturing workflows is gradually becoming more mainstream, and is changing the way people are working for the future- will you get left behind?

Chevron is betting these augmented reality devices will save the company millions of dollars in the coming years as it ramps up its use of Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, which was recently developed to support the sort of remote assistance functions now in use in El Segundo. The company this year nearly doubled its inventory to include more than 110 sets, which it’s now rolling out across its many business units to reduce operational downtime and improve productivity.

Ultimately, the company expects the technology to cut down on miles traveled among its specialists around the world. The company operates in more than 100 countries, and some of its facilities are especially remote.

“We have some experts that travel a half-million miles a year,” said Ed Moore, Chevron’s enterprise architecture and strategy manager. “There’s a lot of opportunity to make savings.”

Chevron’s rollout comes as oil and gas companies across the board look to adopt Silicon Valley technologies to improve efficiency as they heed the lessons of frugality taught by a two-year oil bust and face increasing competition from electric vehicles and renewable power sources.

Tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are marketing their cloud services to the oil and gas sector, and a host of startups are courting energy companies with applications using artificial intelligence and data science.

For the wearer, the HoloLens goggles project an interactive screen showing not only the video call, but also documents and mark-ups from the expert dialed in from afar. With thumbs and forefingers clicking in the air — sort of like air guitar for computers — users can pull up files and scroll through them while working on a project or repair.

By the end of the year, Moore expects more than half of the company’s facilities will have some form of the technology. He sees particular potential in deploying them on offshore rigs, which require helicopter charters and days of travel for engineers.

Right now, the technology doesn’t come cheap: Each set costs about $5,000. But the company estimates that international travel to its facilities costs between $5,000 and $12,000 a trip, and perhaps thousands of dollars more if the destination is particularly difficult to reach.

Read the full feature article from the Houston Chronicle.

SATS, the chief ground-handling and in-flight catering service provider at Singapore Changi Airport, started piloting the Vuzix M300 Smart Glasses to digitize its ramp handling operations in mid-2017 and is now completing phase 2 by introducing and deploying the technology to more than 500 staff at Changi Airport. Using Vuzix M300 Smart Glasses, SATS ramp handling staff will now be able to scan barcodes on baggage and cargo containers to improve the baggage handling process.

Ramp handling staff will also receive real-time loading instructions, which provides the ramp control center with a real-time view of on-ground processes. SATS expects to increase accuracy and improve efficiency of baggage and cargo handling processes for larger wide-body aircraft, by reducing loading times by up to 15 minutes per flight on average.

SGX-listed SATS provides services in 60 airports and 62 cities across Asia and the Middle East.  You may like to watch the two related videos:

What are AR smart glasses doing on Changi airport tarmac? Video link

SATS ramp handling with Augmented Reality. Video link

The group, led by first author Dr. Fatih Incekara from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, converted MRI scans of brain tumor patients into holograms and then overlaid these holograms directly onto the head of each patient using a type of augmented reality technology known as mixed reality. This allowed clinicians to visualize the brain and tumor of each patient right before surgery.

“This new technology proved to be pretty accurate when compared with the neuronavigation system,” Incekara told AuntMinnieEurope.com. “And surgeons reported an improved focus during surgery.”

Tumor localization

In recent decades, image-guided navigation technologies have proved highly practical and effective for use in complex neurosurgeries such as brain tumor removal, the authors noted. Current neuronavigation methods using these tools, however, are impeded by long setup times and require clinicians to repeatedly shift their gaze back and forth between 2D images on a screen and the patient.

Seeking to find a more intuitive way to plan tumor surgery, Incekara and colleagues turned to mixed reality technology — a variation of augmented reality that allows users to see and interact with virtual objects and their actual surroundings. They tested the feasibility of this approach in presurgical planning for the removal of brain tumors from 25 patients at their institution.

The group began by acquiring and then segmenting brain MRI scans of the patients. Next, they reconstructed 3D virtual models of the brain tumors with open-source software (Meshmixer, Autodesk) and used 3D-modeling software (Verto Studio) to make these virtual models compatible for use in a mixed reality device (Hololens, Microsoft).

Wearing a HoloLens headset, the neurosurgeons were able to merge the hologram of the patient’s brain and tumor with the physical head of the patient. This enabled them to determine the location of tumors and then mark the center and border of each tumor directly on the patient’s head. For comparison, the surgical team marked the center and border of the tumors on the patient’s head again, but this time using the standard neuronavigation method. They eventually removed the brain tumors based on measurements from the standard method.

Overall, the holograms of the tumor aligned well with the borders of the actual tumor. The clinicians were able to locate tumors using the mixed reality technique as precisely as they did with the conventional neuronavigation method in nine of the 25 patients (36%). The median deviation between the two techniques was 0.4 cm for the rest of the cases.

Furthermore, the surgeons claimed that using the mixed reality device during the operation enhanced their ergonomics, their understanding of the relationship between the tumor and the brain, and their attention and focus on the patient.

With the new technology, Colgate-Palmolive employees will be able to troubleshoot machinery while keeping their hands free to work and use their voice to engage with company subject matter experts (SMEs), equipment suppliers and manufacturing teams across sites for support and cross training.  In addition, Colgate-Palmolive plans to use the devices to retrieve and capture documents and video.

“Colgate-Palmolive tested RealWear HMT-1 through successful pilots in 8 locations and is now standardizing globally on this wearable device for our manufacturing operations,” said Warren Pruitt, VP Global Engineering at Colgate-Palmolive.  “Looking ahead, we see an opportunity to use this tool beyond the plant floor for improved performance and new efficiencies.”

“Colgate-Palmolive’s global deployment signifies that industrial wearable computing has crossed the chasm into mainstream manufacturing companies,” said Andy Lowery, RealWear CEO and cofounder. “This has been a textbook example of how to move with energy and purpose, from evaluation through pilot to global deployment.”

The commercial deployment will include Librestream Onsight Connect for remote mentoring and RealWear Foresight cloud platform for app deployment.

When asked, “What areas do you see having the biggest need in the future?” Spangler replied:

“Workforce, workforce, workforce. SCMEP works with manufacturing companies of all sizes and industries around the state. The No. 1 issue is identifying and recruiting a sustainable workforce. Companies are now thinking of out-of-the-box solutions for how they recruit and retain their workforce. We see more companies moving towards a virtual/augmented reality training method to recruit younger workers, which in turn has a higher learning retention rate compared to traditional training methods.”

How SCMEP are attempting to help meet the future needs of the industry is vetting future needs of South Carolina’s manufacturers and identifying resources that will bring bottom- and top-line improvements to the manufacturing community. We are benchmarking what the top original equipment manufacturers around the globe are doing and determining what best practices/technologies can help small- to medium-size manufacturing companies in South Carolina. The main goal is to find resources at the right price to assist companies in adopting the technology.

Other topics discussed include the Upstate manufacturing community, the market conditions impacting manufacturers in the area in 2019. How they addressing the widening skills gap, funding sources and details of their competitiveness review.

View Original source article.

Congress will be welcoming top vertical industry executives end-users from Manufacturing, Energy & Utilities, Connected Transport, Healthcare, and Buildings & Infrastructure.