Have you asked any IT professionals or business managers what they’re doing with Augmented Reality? A small fraction can share how they’ve considered using AR for improving their workplace processes, but most inquiries about how companies are using AR begin with a blank stare and end in frustration.  

The AREA and its members are developing high-quality content that can be the basis of more precise and fruitful dialog than we often have today. Once there is a shared conceptual foundation, we’ll be able to discuss the concrete benefits as well as the risks of introducing Augmented Reality in the enterprise with our audiences.

Explore the Audience Knowledge Level

Casual discussion between acquaintances or between a supplier and a potential customer can’t evolve gracefully if they must begin with deep explanations or clarifications of confusing terminologies. Don’t start with a dry definition. Focus first on either a known or shared challenge or potential benefit and make sure you can squeeze a few terms in casually in the first minutes.

“Isn’t it frustrating that we can’t significantly increase our productivity?” you can inquire. Be specific about the use case, if you can. You can substitute “increasing productivity” with other metrics such as reduce errors, reduce risk or increase safety. Drop in some keywords to make sure they understand that you feel new technologies could help. Avoid buzzwords such as wearables, IoT, Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality in the first five minutes. Try to avoid bringing up Hollywood movies or popular science fiction books that have Augmented Reality.

Then you can say that you’ve heard or that you’re exploring how this new technology could play a role by overlaying digital information on the real world. Let your prospective customer or partner, or whomever you’re speaking to, be the first to mention wearables or AR.

When asked if they’ve heard of it and what they’re doing or planning to do with Augmented Reality, an IT professional will respond in one of two ways. The younger the person, the more likely they are to have heard and understood the potential. That said, they may not have thought to apply it to their job.

“That’s technology for your smartphone. I’ve seen it used in a museum, once” they might say. Then they either describe how the AR experience failed or just didn’t bring value to them.  Such conversations often conclude with the person dismissing the whole idea.

“It’s probably good for entertainment, but we’re not that kind of company,” is not an uncommon conclusion.

A more knowledgeable audience may remember Virtual Reality and the promises it held but didn’t deliver. Then you will need to reprogram them to understand the differences. 

Others will have had no exposure at all to Augmented Reality.

Light Bulb Moment

Once you’ve decided if the conversation is worthy of continuing investment, you’re going to aim for a “light bulb” moment: a look in their eye that shows that the person with whom you’re meeting has had a breakthrough in understanding.

To get to that moment of realization may take several steps. As already suggested, if you’re in conversation with an IT professional or line manager with a lot of engineering experience, you will get there more quickly.

Begin by building upon something very familiar. Everyone has seen and almost all have personally used video conferencing. AREA member David Doral, Director of AERTEC Solutions begins his education process by suggesting that when trying to understand a problem at a remote location, it would be valuable to be able to see things as if from another’s eyes.

“We suggest to the customer that we support the technician in the field or on the shop floor with an expert who is somewhere else,” explains Doral. He doesn’t say where that expert is, but makes it perfectly clear that they are the key to solving a problem and there’s not time for that expert to personally fly to the location. In AR, this use case is known as the “remote expert,” but this term doesn’t need to be introduced.

“Then, if they like this concept, we can suggest that the expert could draw arrows, point or otherwise indicate steps with animations,” continues Doral. “Imagine that the person who is in the field or on the shop floor is providing the remote hands, performing tasks as directed and under the supervision of the expert.”

Up Close and Personal

Another approach to reach a light bulb moment is to demonstrate an Augmented Reality experience right away. Sometimes, this can be performed using a tablet and an object that you’ve brought with you. Choose an object that is likely to be professional and slightly complex in nature but with a very simple user interface, such as a pocket projector. A virtual interface can appear with Augmented Reality to help the user with configuration and operation.

Three-dimensional objects are nice and have a big “wow” factor but a photo will also work well and may have higher performance. Lighting, and reflections on a glossy surface, may have a big impact on your ability to track the target, so test your sample photo or object well before using it. Be sure to give the other person the device to hold and move around, to interact with the content in the experience.

Often people try to simulate this effect, and reduce the risk of failure, by showing a video of an AR experience recording, but your audience will assign lower credibility to a video because they understand that special effects as seen in the movies are now commonplace.  Hasn’t everyone seen Minority Report and Iron Man?

From a shared understanding of the benefits of Augmented Reality, you might be able to progress to talking about a project and the potential of implementing AR in a few use cases.

What techniques have you used to successfully start a conversation about enterprise Augmented Reality?  Share your methods with others in the comments below.

Which of the many use cases for enterprise Augmented Reality should you implement first?

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Selecting the best use cases for enterprise Augmented Reality introduction is arguably one of the most important steps that business managers will perform when exploring the technology’s potential to impact workplace performance.

During the ARise ’15 conference, Carl Byers, president of the AREA and Chief Strategy Officer of Contextere, presented key concepts and provided valuable recommendations for those who are planning to introduce AR in their organizations. This post builds upon those remarks.

Why Use Case Selection is Important

Careful selection of use cases for your company’s first AR project is critical for several reasons. First, the project will be used to choose the tools and to pilot the selected technologies while learning their benefits and limitations. Second, successful results will illustrate AR’s potential and help obtain buy-in for further investments from other groups and management.

The enterprise IT department is frequently involved with vendor selection and assessments of new tools. Since hardware is almost always involved in the delivery of AR experiences, the IT department may consider support for enterprise mobility management, connectivity and data security among other processes and objectives. The evaluation of a vendor’s training and support programs may also be performed during or in parallel with the development of the first project. Consider use cases that leverage prior positive experiences with IT introduction projects. A use case in a department that has not had prior IT-assisted technology introductions may introduce unforeseen problems.

Other departments, for example, human performance support and training organizations, also frequently feel they have a stake in how Augmented Reality is introduced.  Their interests need to be weighed and considered when selecting initial use cases.

Driving Internal Rate of Return for AR

The ultimate goal of introducing a new technology is to improve operational efficiency. Efficiency might be improved by driving down costs or time, or improve workforce productivity. Sometimes capturing the full value of a new technology involves organizational change.

When evaluating possible AR use cases, it’s important to consider how deeply changes associated with AR introduction may impact a business process, or multiple processes. An initial, low-cost research project in a sandboxed environment or an isolated field support improvement for one specific piece of equipment may be just right. But if the organization’s management is exploring more dramatic changes, AR introduction may be part of a larger initiative.

When considering the details of the AR introduction project and calculating IRR, it’s important to examine the productivity changes that could, once demonstrated for an isolated case, be applied across an entire factory or line of products and customers. Consider how a few small and specific pilots could meet your long term goals.

That said, it’s well known that large-scale change is usually slower. Should an AR pilot be considered as part of a larger organizational transition, the project may have to cope with many more variables and could experience greater delays.  The good news is that, if proven in the context of a broader change management approach, AR adoption may be driven from within as “just an integral part” of the organizational improvements.  

Complexity that’s Easily Tracked

Early resistance to AR projects has, in some organizations, been traced to the fact that the task or use case that was selected for AR testing was easy for an employee to perform unassisted. The lesson is that if there isn’t a pain point, AR isn’t needed.  Don’t waste valuable time, money or political “capital” of an organization.

That said, there are also risks in overreaching with respect to the current state of the art of Augmented Reality. If the user pain point proposed for a use case involves conditions that are difficult for current AR systems to identify or objects that are difficult to track, the technology may not perform reliably. Lack of reliability and repeatability fuels doubts and generally reduces the user and management’s appetite for the new technology.

Leveraging Existing Enterprise Data Stores

Developing the first AR experiences for a pilot requires new skills, methodologies and tools. Rather than adding to the project workload by developing new content as well, a use case can reuse or leverage existing enterprise data.

While some assets may need to be modified or adapted for mobile delivery platforms, overall project complexity will be lower and less costly when new AR experiences are based on existing enterprise data.

Involving Mission Critical Systems

Whenever mission critical or other high-impact enterprise systems are involved in an AR pilot project, the project may be escalated to management levels that are more risk averse: the CEO doesn’t want to do anything that might impact sales and stock prices, and the C-suite frequently shares that aversion to risk. On the other hand, if you can gain their support, their subordinates will be on board with the project and there will be fewer delays due to internal doubts.

The need for deep testing of any interface with a mission critical system, if that’s the route that’s recommended for an early AR project, is more costly and time consuming and may introduce unanticipated delays. If testing fails, integration with mission critical systems may cause the project to be cancelled.

Recommendations

1. Choose one or a few use cases where value can be measured clearly. For example, reduced down time, increased safety or compliance.
2. Focus on simple, practical, quick value capture. In the figure below we show how seven different factors can be weighted:
   1. Use a standard network architecture
   2. Design for bursty communication for longer battery life
   3. Identify where there’s large differences between novice and expert performance
   4. Make it easy to capture and repeat best practices
   5. Find use cases where some network services (e.g., videoconferencing with an expert) or special equipment (e.g., safety glasses) is already required
   6. Solve a current or recurring pain point
   7. Provide access to enterprise data systems via mainstream (legacy) interfaces
3. Thoroughly document all assumptions, steps taken and feedback, and share these with your technology partner.

Source: APX Labs

Choose and Choose Again

There are potentially hundreds of interesting use cases, and we’re currently building a use cases listing on the AREA site.

Choosing the initial AR use case is, as we’ve discussed, important but not the end of the process.

Frequently there are multiple AR use cases that can impact the operational efficiency of an enterprise. As a result, it’s not unusual for an AR pilot project to take workflows of multiple departments or processes into account. If this is the case, make sure the different use cases are well defined and the lessons learned in one project are captured and applied to others.

What are the initial use cases you’ve considered for evaluating whether Augmented Reality is right for your organization?

Want to hear more? Watch this video…