A press release on Market Wired earlier this week reported that Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, have announced that they can enable multi-user Augmented Reality on their Programmable Video platform. This will allow creators to develop engaging communications for customers using a combination of real life elements and virtual overlay.

Twilio’s Programmable Video offers the following communications capabilities:

• Global media server infrastructure
• Media Sync API
• DataTrack API

These features work in tandem with other AR capabilities such as ARKit, and provide potential for future business communications. Rob Brazier, director of product for Programmable Video, is quoted to have said that Augmented Reality provides beneficial opportunities for sales conversations and remote support.

Examples of AR communications use cases now available include:

• Real-time translation of audio content into user’s language with additional subtitles
• Remote collaboration on 3D virtual resources in various industries
• Physical/verbal/emotional data being synced in real time to virtual gaming avatars

As the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) went into effect just last month, French officials in Vancouver are providing the local tech market with information on what’s now Europe’s second-largest venture capital market, in an effort to attract B.C. startups to engage France as an incubator.

The largest of these efforts will come on November 2 and 3, when the Vancouver French consulate will co-host “Enterprising Culture” – a combination of panel discussions, industry forums, demos and networking gatherings – at Emily Carr University’s new campus on Great Northern Way.

Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media (CDM) and Emily Carr are the other co-hosts.

Philippe Sutter, the new consul general of France in Vancouver, said the B.C. tech sector and its startup scene are squarely in the sights of French officials because the country is looking for young, innovative talent to kick-start Macron’s plan to invigorate the economy through technology.

“The business links and co-operations between French startups and B.C. startups will be very important,” Sutter said, adding that officials want to avoid putting out the message that CETA would benefit only agriculture or resources trade. “Strengthening the relationship between the young generation – so not only encouraging interaction between big corporations, but also companies in the startup phase – is crucial for strengthening trade and investment between France and B.C.”

Patrick Pennefather, continuing senior lecturer at CDM and one of the event’s key organizers, said it will gather, in addition to other industry attendees, five virtual-reality/augmented-reality (VR/AR) technology companies each from B.C., Ontario and France.

He added that the timing not only demonstrates France’s newly invigorated interest in technology like VR/AR, but also highlights a broad, global convergence of awareness of how such technology can have broad implications in industries like health care.

“The important thing, I think, is this seems to be an event that’s well timed and current to the [industry] ecosystem in Vancouver,” Pennefather said. “The ecosystem here is now better at generating investment and interest, not just from government, but from external parties as well.”

He added that CDM representatives will likely attend a February conference in Paris on VR/AR to see if further development opportunities exist. He said CDM’s position as a research and development hub has already attracted industry interest, and the French wave is simply another part of that enthusiasm.

Further information from the same article can be found here.

A post on TechCrunch this week by Megan Rose Dickey revealed that Magic Leap has now confirmed series D round funding of $502 million.  Magic Leap is well known for the secrecy around its products as it’s not totally clear what the company is doing, however, it has certainly raised a lot of money in total – more than $1.9 billion to invest in augmented reality and mixed reality.

This week the company announced that it has raised $502 million in Series D round led by Temasek with participation from EDBI, Grupo Globo, Janus Henderson, Alibaba Group, Fidelity Management and others. Magic Leap authorized up to $1 billion in new shares.

“We’re excited to welcome Temasek and the other new investors in this round to the Magic Leap family,” Magic Leap founder and president Rony Abovitz said in a release. “We also greatly appreciate the strong support and partnership from our existing shareholders.”

To date, we’ve been able to gather that the company may be launching a device called “Magic Leap One.” And last month, Bloomberg suggested Magic Leap may be gearing up to ship that device to a “small group of users” in the next six months or so.

We wait with baited breath.

Highlighted snippets from the article include:

1. The bigger promise for AR (as opposed to the consumer market) which is estimated to become a $49 billion market by 2021, is for the professional hands-on workforce: Access to information and assistance on the go can make a huge difference in speed and efficiency.
2. General Electric is one of several companies quietly testing AR technology as a method for improving productivity and reducing errors.
3. Jay Kim’s comments focus on the excitement that was seized upon by early adopters wanting to make a difference to enterprises where real impact could be felt. “In an increasingly competitive global economic landscape, enterprise buyers look at every edge they can attain to maintain their competitive advantage over others,” Kim says.
4. Another AREA member, Lockheed Martin, is mentioned for their development of mixed reality in the aerospace industry.
5. According to a Forrester Research study, an estimated 14.4 million US workers will be wearing smart glasses in the workplace by 2025.
6. Earlier this year, Google Glass returned with an Enterprise Editionthat fixed many of the technical flaws of the initial product. It can now be tacked on safety glasses, making it suitable for more work environments.

The full article can be read here.

Highlighted snippets from the article include:

1. The bigger promise for AR (as opposed to the consumer market) which is estimated to become a $49 billion market by 2021, is for the professional hands-on workforce: Access to information and assistance on the go can make a huge difference in speed and efficiency.
2. General Electric is one of several companies quietly testing AR technology as a method for improving productivity and reducing errors.
3. Jay Kim’s comments focus on the excitement that was seized upon by early adopters wanting to make a difference to enterprises where real impact could be felt. “In an increasingly competitive global economic landscape, enterprise buyers look at every edge they can attain to maintain their competitive advantage over others,” Kim says.
4. Another AREA member, Lockheed Martin, is mentioned for their development of mixed reality in the aerospace industry.
5. According to a Forrester Research Study, an estimated 14.4 million US workers will be wearing smart glasses in the workplace by 2025.
6. Earlier this year, Google Glass returned with an Enterprise Edition that fixed many of the technical flaws of the initial product. It can now be tacked on safety glasses, making it suitable for more work environments.

Company CEO Brian Ballard says the hardware is beginning to mature, but what’s been missing is a development tool for creating content more easily. The latest update to the company’s Skylight development platform includes several new pieces to increase the use of augmented reality inside large companies.

For starters, the company has added a couple of tools that simplify app creation including an Application Builder with pre-built user interface cards that enable non-technical personnel to drag and drop these cards to build a simple workflow application without any coding skill. Skylight Connect is another new piece designed to tap into a company databases without any coding. Upskill claims to handle the connectivity for you in the background. You just point to the database and it does the rest.

If the legacy application is a bit tougher than something Connect can handle, there is also an SDK designed for enterprise programmers to connect to systems that prove a bit more challenging. Finally the company includes Skylight Live, a Facebook Live-like experience that allows a person to broadcast what they are seeing through their smart glasses.

Upskill hopes that their update will bring large companies one step closer to deploying AR applications at scale. Very few enterprises have large scale deployments yet, although ones such as Boeing and GE are seriously testing proof of concept.

Most enterprise companies have a vast legacy infrastructure and the AR applications often have to work with these legacy systems to pull information like inventory, documentation or back office data. This requires a platform that’s been built to handle those kinds of connections.

Skylight has always aspired to be that platform, but the upgrade enhances that and adds tools to bring less technical personnel into the content creation mix.

What’s more, when companies go to the trouble and expense of building an AR app that pulls data from various systems across the company, they don’t necessarily want to be tied to a smart glasses proprietary development system that locks them into a single hardware manufacturer. With Skylight, they can move much more smoothly from headset to headset type without having to redo the code in a substantial way.

Jay Kothari, Project Lead at Glass at X, is schedules to offer the opening keynote this year. Kothari will use the event as an opportunity to explore the implications of wearable tech, specifically Glass, on the future of work.

Kothari’s session will explore the enterprise wearables space and address the reasons why enterprises can no longer afford to ignore this new category of technology. Some key questions that Kothari will explore include the following: Are wearables a legitimate enterprise priority right now? Has the technology caught up to enterprises’ needs? Which devices and applications are seeing the most traction today? How will the role of wearables in the workplace evolve? And how can enterprises prepare for the future? What’s clear is that Kothari’s questions are questions that everyone should now be asking, whether they’re educators or professionals leading an enterprise looking ahead to the future of workplace training.

The article runs through a fairly basic description of wearable tech.  We are well on our way to realizing the shift from mobile phones to wearable tech, and the upcoming Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit in Boston this month is yet another sign of how rapidly the wearable tech market is expanding.

Safety, compliance and training are all on the agenda at the upcoming Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit. In a session focused on wearables “below the neck,” for example, presenters will explore how devices ranging from smartwatches and smart clothing to exoskeletons and body-worn sensors can be used to track workplace activity to increase efficiency, productivity, and safety; collect real-time data and communication; generate employee biometrics; help employees with navigation; and increase on-site security.

In another session, Albert Zulps, a Regional Director at construction firm, Skanska, will explore wearable tech in relation to construction industry safety. As noted in the program overview, the presentation will “on how wearables, IoT, sensing devices, virtual reality and RTLS can enhance environmental awareness and real-time visibility of worker’s safety and productivity on active job sites, as well as into operations.”

The implications of wearable technology for workplace training are profound. Indeed, it now seems likely that over the coming decade, wearable tech will become the primary interface through which workplace training is delivered. This will help to create new types of apprentice-based opportunities but also enable trainers to collect detailed feedback on what trainees do and do not understand. There is hope this will lead to more learner-specific training opportunities and over all, more effective and cost-effective training programs.

The Strategic Alliance also offers an expanded platform of products and services to existing 3DS customers in Finland pursuing Dynamic Product Visualisation.

Chrysalisforge, a company established in January 2017, provides various services and products including, but not limited to, strategic consulting related to automated visualization of industrial products and processes offering value added features to industrial companies.

Pontus Blomberg, VP Business Development of 3DS, said: “We complement each other well. It is of mutual advantage to share knowledge and to cooperate in offering clients value propositions.”

Michael Rygol, MD of Chrysalisforge, explained: “3DS, with their background of 3D graphics, and more recently, developments in customer-focused AR and VR, are well-placed to capitalise on the rapidly growing worldwide interest in this space. The UK, in particular, has a strong record of developing and adopting new technology innovations in a business context. I see the combination of 3D Studio’s customer-centric developments in tandem with a further focus on enterprise usage as presenting great opportunities in the significant British engineering sector.”

Readers can find out more about the work of 3D Studio Blomberg on their website.

The mechanic is on the ground with a plane in Boston that’s in need of engineer servicing, and she is using AR technology (particularly “see what I see” video conferencing features) on the repair with an engineer in San Jose who worked on the original design of the engine.

The engineer can use smart glasses to electronically “circle” a part that needs attention (shown on the screen of the smart glasses so that both the mechanic and the remotely-connected engineer).

The engineer in San Jose can provide more detailed guidance to the mechanic in Boston, getting her to look more closely at various aspects of the aircraft part that she is working on – and provide real-time feedback to the mechanic on the next steps that she needs to take.

How many challenges are solved at once:

• Allowing the engineer in San Jose to deliver detailed, contextual guidance that allows him to see and interact with the malfunctioning aircraft part, so that he is able to scale the delivery of his highly-valued skills to the mechanic in Boston (without having to travel in-person to do so).
• Using an engineer in San Jose to troubleshoot an MRO issue in Boston, which helps provide national and international scale for the engineer’s employer.
• Offering the mechanic in Boston immediate access to the latest task checklists (for working on the troublesome part) – and any existing training videos – directly via her smart glasses before initiating the video conference call to the engineer in . This ensures that valuable aviation engineer time is only sought when other support avenues have been exhausted.
• Getting the right information to the right place – quickly and easily. Using smart glasses (and either voice, gestures or head movements to access the information and remote experts she needs), the mechanic is safely able to get at all the information she needs without having to remove work gloves, move away from the part she is working with or otherwise be distracted from the task at hand.

AREA member RealWear was named the Frost & Sullivan Industrial Wearables New Product Innovation Award 2017.  Details can be read in full in the 12-page document with the key facts being summarised below:

Industry challenges are explained. Wearables adoption in industrial sectors began with handheld devices such as rugged mobiles and tablets customized for industrial surroundings.

RealWear, is an industrial wearables start-up based in Silicon Valley, US that has bridged the gap between high-performance hardware and user-friendly software to create a new rugged hands-free head-mounted tablet for industrial applications in sectors including oil and gas, automotive, and mining.

Details of RealWear’s HMT-1 new product attributes and customer impact are explained.  As RealWear HMT-1 is predominantly used for applications such as maintenance and data collection in hostile environments in the oil and gas, energy, and utilities sectors, its reliability has a direct impact on the downtime, production, and cost incurred for the customer.

Features of the product are highlighted, including line of sight. While most of the industrial wearables in the market hinder the operator’s line-of-sight in some way, HMT-1 is inherently designed to minimize disruption to the operator’s line-of sight, and the arm can even be completely moved out of sight, or can be shifted to left or right, depending on the user’s preference. Adding to this flexibility, HMT-1 can clip onto many models of personal protective equipment (PPE) hard hat and be used with any type of eyeglasses.

The report goes on to explain the significance of new product innovation.