The start-up behind PoindextAr, Gravity Jack, is using technology that tracks the position of real-life objects down to a fraction of an inch of how they appear before you.  In an article by psfk.com, manufacturing uses Augmented Reality for many practical reasons and this new technology is necessary for devices like the Microsoft HoloLens. The PoindextAR (named after Gravity Jack CTO Shawn Poindexter) enables you to learn new interface, helps with extreme precision and helps you work alongside a monitor giving you information all at a low latency and highly accurate.

The company aims to support utility services, manufacturers and perhaps even military, where its technology could be put to use to quicken routine maintenance and inspections. It is said that PoindextAR shows promise due to the platform’s versatility and its ease of deployment.

While digital transformation has disrupted almost every type of business, the real estate industry has been traditionally slow to move with the times, until now, according to an article on Enterprise Innovation.  The article draws upon comments from the recent Asia Pacific Leadership Symposium in Hong Kong organised by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In areas ranging from computer-aided design, to development of new construction materials and technologies, to the use of Augmented-Reality marketing solutions, a long list of innovative new technologies is starting to gain traction, with potentially profound consequences for the industry. 

The rise of Building Information Modelling (BIM)

One area that developers are more certain about is the potential of new software design tools to manage construction work.

The system gaining most traction is Building Information Modeling (BIM), which replaces traditional hardcopy blueprints with 3-D computer modeling. The system, combined with the easy availability of handheld devices allowing the concept to be applied onsite, gives it an advantage over legacy paper-based systems, helping architects and contractors to collaborate more easily and make on-the-fly alterations to existing designs.
 

BIM-built New Karolinska Hospital

The symposium discussed the construction of Sweden’s newly opened 12,000-room New Karolinska Hospital, the world’s largest public-private partnership hospital project to date. Its entire, very complex, design was executed using a BIM platform.

Post-construction, BIM is also being used at New Karolinska for handling overall facility management. As the hospital’s BIM model contains all construction data in a single plan, managers know immediately which materials are used in any part of the building, where all components are located, and exactly what part will be needed to repair any given equipment breakdown.

In addition, sensors have been embedded throughout the hospital structure to guide a fleet of 29 automated vehicles deployed to deal with a total of 1,600 deliveries daily throughout the facility, using BIM as an address book.
 

Prefabrication technology

Prefabrication is another well-established technology steadily growing in popularity. In Singapore, developers have been forced to accelerate adoption of prefab techniques because government policy requires builders to boost productivity in order to cut the number of foreign workers employed in the industry.

In Hong Kong, soaring labour costs have also made prefab an increasingly attractive option—although the relatively small size of the local market continues to pose challenges in terms of leveraging economies of scale.  Elsewhere, though, the low cost of labour in Asia’s emerging economies means that prefabrication is generally seen as uncompetitive.

Obstacles to digital transformation

The symposium noted that there are a number of reasons why the pace of change in the real estate industry is slow:

• The useful life of buildings is long.
• Another bigger obstacle to progress is resistance from the status quo.
• Contractors reluctant to invest in new technology, even as tech costs continue to fall.
• Regulation remains the biggest roadblock to change. The high level of oversight in Asia’s construction industries is a result of a “need to ensure building safety, creating deep bureaucratic roots with a by-product of this culture being that widespread adoption of new technologies requires wholesale changes in existing building codes and approval processes”.

In an opinion piece this week by Zdnet.com, Augmented Reality is discussed.  The premise of the article is that all technology organizations in the Enterprise must start learning about Augmented Reality.

Questions such as ‘What’s the difference between AR, VR and Mixed Reality?’ ‘What kind of investment is needed to make this vision to fruition?’ ‘What’s the time frame for all this to happen?’ and ‘How many brands today prepare for this inevitable future?’ are asked and answered and the book ‘The Fourth Transformation’ is discussed in detail.

According to the article in the next few years, medicine, training and education, customer and field service and transportation will change as the technology companies, telecom suppliers and governments build the infrastructure needed to support a wide-scale adoption of Augmented Reality.

Although AR requires a significant technology infrastructure, the article states, the business case must drive how you deploy the technology in the enterprise. For example, if your company provides field service, the first step is figuring out how augmented reality can help your organization better serve its customers.

To read the full article click here.

At this year’s Knowledge17 Conference, Fujitsu demonstrated a solution to provide effective field services for enterprise organisations according to an article on News.sys.com

Using predictive analytics, close integration with ServiceNow and their Augmented Reality visor, Fujitsu can automatically identify an impending failure, generate a request in ServiceNow, assign an engineer based on geographical location and expertise and then provide both ticket information and repair guidance to the engineer via their augmented reality visor.

Fujitsu believes that this approach can proactively eliminate incidents, reduce incident recovery time, increase engineer utilization and provide better employee performance metrics.

The Augmented World Expo (AWE) will take place this year at the Santa Clara Convention Centre in Silicon Valley from May 31 – June 2.  Whether you’re able to attend or not, readers will be interested in an opinion piece by Charlie Fink in Forbes, about this event which is the longest running conference and expo dedicated to Augmented and Virtual Reality.  Last week’s announcement of the agenda has produced the comment: ‘its most comprehensive agenda ever for AR and VR.’

Industry experts who are scheduled to speak on the AWE stage include:

• Jim Heppelmann, (President of CEO PTC)
• Rikard Steiber (President of HTC)
• Achin Bhowmik (Intel)
• Zvi Greenstein (Nvidia)
• Ralph Osterhout (Osterhout Design Group)
• Tony Parisi (Unity Technologies),
• Tim Leland (Qualcomm)
• Jay Wright (Vuforia)
• Meron Gribetz (Meta)
• John C.C. Fan (Kopin)
• Richard Lucquet  (Verizon)
• Gary Radburn (Dell)
• Ruth Bram (Oculus)

“They are looking for business solutions, clues about the impact of these new technologies on the consumer side, and the tools emerging to support an ecosystem of hardware and software developers that is developing too rapidly to keep track of without an event like AWE. AWE has become the place where Fortune 500 companies find business solutions, strategic partnerships are forged, funds raised, talent hired, and new start-ups are born” Said Ori Inbar, founder of AWE.

AWE features keynotes and discussion panels on the future of AR and VR consumer and enterprise technology led by industry futurists and pioneers, hardware, software and mainstream brands, and investors and venture capitalists. AWE 2017 sessions cover a wide range of topics including manufacturing, training, transportation, retail, healthcare, aerospace, media, entertainment, marketing and advertising and more.

To read the Forbes piece by Charlie Fink click here

An article on CIO Dive offers a perspective on Intel’s upgrade to its enterprise smart glasses.  Intel has announced it is upgrading its smart glasses to allow workers to access information and data in real time whether they are at headquarters or in the field, the company said on Wednesday at the Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit.

• The Recon Jet is an enterprise wearable solution that Intel says can help businesses improve productivity and worker safety while reducing errors and training costs.
• Designed with jobs in field service, manufacturing, logistics and maintenance in mind, the glasses provide visual information hands-free and at eye level. The product use helps employees avoid the “clipboard and gut” decision-making by accessing data instead, according to Intel.  
• Intel isn’t the only company pushing wearables glasses for the enterprise. Last November, VMware announced it was adding smart glasses management features to its VMware AirWatch enterprise mobility management platform, making it easier for businesses to bring augmented and mixed reality devices to the enterprise. 
• Wearables are best known as a consumer tool, but Intel has pushed for their use in the enterprise. Though some businesses are beginning to use the technology, smart glasses in the enterprise haven’t really taken off yet.

Read the first installment here.

The topic of security in enterprise AR environments is both under-addressed and vital. Our cybersecurity team at Brainwaive is excited about the opportunity to work with the AREA to protect companies’ information and assets through this first-ever AREA-funded research project. The objective is to develop and popularize a reliable, repeatable means of assessing security when adopting AR headsets/glassware solutions in industrial/enterprise settings.

With several weeks of R&D behind us, the Brainwaive cybersecurity team is beginning to finalize the scope and structure of an AR Security Framework and Testing Protocol. While most of our initial focus is on security threats and the defensive posture of wearable AR devices themselves, it’s important to recognize that the headset or smart glasses are just one element in an end-to-end AR “solution stack.” The Security Framework will eventually address all the unique elements of the AR stack, including wireless networking, data gateways, cloud services, applications, and more. Additionally, full enterprise protection requires development and governance of sound use policies and procedures, and training to develop end-user competence with the systems.

From a security standpoint, wearable AR devices may seem to be similar to common mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers. However, we’ve identified multiple important factors that make AR systems unique, and we’re mapping the new trust boundaries and roles of the users. The Brainwaive team will elaborate on these in the final report and in our presentation at the upcoming Augmented World Expo. Also, in this initial project, we’re focusing only on characterizing the inherent design characteristics of the wearable device hardware and software from a security perspective. In follow-on projects, we’ll perform active penetration testing to determine the robustness of device designs and their level of defense against malicious attacks.

Knowledge is power when it comes to protecting your enterprise assets from bad actors trying to break in and steal sensitive information or disrupt your operations. Employing the AREA AR Security Framework and Testing Protocol, enterprise users will be better equipped to select and use AR headset solutions providing the proper types and levels of security for their specific use cases.

Tony Hodgson is CEO of Brainwaive LLC.

Hyderabad-based Imaginate, a Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) company, is the developer of NuSpace, a hardware-agnostic collaboration platform that enables people to communicate in an interactive realistic virtual world. NuSpace was rated as the most innovative and high potential product by Nasscom in 2016. Imaginate today is present in virtually every sector from defense to retail.

“Our product NuSpace is like the Webex of VR and AR. It will revolutionise the way people collaborate and learn by leveraging the best of both—a physical classroom-like environment and the ease of a digital conferencing platform like Webex or Skype,” explains Satyanarayana, the company’s Founder. NuSpace finds utilisation in specialised industrial training, engineering design, remote maintenance and repair.

“With just a 2 Mbps connection, every NuSpace user can communicate with others across geographies through their realistic avatars. This is less than the minimum internet speed that a HD video connection would need,” he says.

With NuSpace, it does not matter what mixed reality gear the wearer is using as NuSpace is hardware agnostic, making it easy for companies to hop on to the platform. They are working on a few pilots with large corporations.

Some of the popular collaboration platforms in VR include AltspaceVR and vTime that operate in the social networking space.

The imagination at Imaginate has not stopped with commercial and field level implementations as they want to enter medical education with specialised solutions like LiVAR (an AR solution that indicates open liver surgery – it processes the CT scan of liver and generates a 3D model with tumor bodies.)

With a revenue target of Rs 6 crore, Satyanarayana is aiming for Rs 100 crore turnover in the next five years besides entering the US market with more AR and VR solutions. In the line, are more AR/VR solutions in the fields of retail, defence, entertainment and healthcare.  The start-up raised about Rs 3.5 crore from SRI Capital, a seed stage venture fund based in Philadelphia recently.

An article on Upload VR discusses how Augmented Reality can help in aviation to overcome the problem of pilot human error.  With AR applications, timely and relevant information can be presented to the pilot when it is needed in an intuitive format, so that they can focus on the task at hand. Some benefits listed in the article include:

• AR can overlay relevant information on demand
• AR systems can visualize terrain, navigation, air-traffic, instrument, weather, and airspace information in a 360-degree
• AR systems can display a simple corridor overlay to show the appropriate path – useful for take-off and landing
• Important information including artificial horizons, waypoints, weather updates, flight plans, restricted areas and terrain information can be displayed to provide complete situational awareness
• AR helps with Maintenance Repair and Operations (MRO) 
• Help with Training and licensing technicians

The article also discusses an AR application that is already in use, the Aero Glass, and also states that Augmented Reality applications like the Aero Glass will help pilots of the future avoid costly mistakes and make timely decisions that will save lives.

AREA member Scope AR, announced this week that they will be launching a version of their WorkLink Augmented Reality content authoring platform on the HoloLens. This gives the customers the ability to help remote workers learn to repair or assemble complex machinery.

Their WorkLink product can utilize the HoloLens’ outward facing depth sensors to map a rough mesh of objects and attach AR step-by-step instructions to the real-world objects with “the same ease as creating a PowerPoint presentation,” according to the company. This will allow non-technical employees a chance to easily build content and push it out to supported platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows.

Scott Montgomerie, CEO, Scope AR says, “This is going to be the easier way to get content onto the HoloLens.”

 Scope AR builds tools which allow workers to see CAD models overlaid on real world objects (while getting live support from specialists), giving them the ability to easily see when there’s an issue while also being able to deliver quick fixes. Most of this work is done on tablets using marker-based tracking, but the company is increasingly looking towards the headset-based future of AR.