The Augmented Reality (AR) marketplace is evolving so rapidly, it’s a challenge to gauge the current state of market education, enterprise adoption, provider investment, and more. What are the greatest barriers to growth? How quickly are companies taking pilots into production? Where should the industry be focusing its efforts? To answer these and other questions and create a baseline to measure trends and momentum, we at the AREA are pleased to announce the launch of our first annual ecosystem survey.

Please click here to take the survey. It won’t take more than five minutes to complete. Submissions will be accepted through February 8, 2017. We’ll compile the responses and share the results as soon as they’re available.

Make sure your thoughts and observations are captured so our survey will be as comprehensive and meaningful as possible. Thank you!

Previous: Part 3: Augmented Reality Software is Here to Stay

As I discussed in a LinkedIn Pulse post about AR apps, we cannot expect users to run a different app for each real world target they want to use with AR or one monolithic AR application for everything in the physical world. It is unscalable (i.e., far too time-consuming and costly). It’s unclear precisely when, but I’m confident that we will, one day, rely on systems that make content ready for AR presentation as a natural result of digital design processes.

The procedures or tools for automatically converting documentation or any digital content into AR experiences for enterprise use cases are not available. Nor will they emerge in the next 12 to 18 months. To begin the journey, companies must develop a path that leads from current procedures that are completely separate from AR presentation to the ideal processes for continuous AR delivery.

Leaders need to collaborate with stakeholders to focus on areas where AR can make a difference quickly.

Boiling the Ocean

There are hundreds of AR use cases in every business. All AR project managers should maintain a catalog of possible use cases. Developing a catalog of use cases begins with identification of challenges that are facing a business. As simple as this sounds, revealing challenges increases exposure and reduces confidence in existing people and systems. Most of the data for this process is buried or burned before it escapes. Without data to support the size and type of challenges in a business unit, the AR advocate is shooting in the dark. The risk of not focusing on the best use case and challenges is too high.

There need to be initiatives to help AR project managers and engineers focus on the problems most likely to be addressed with AR. Organizational change would be a likely group to drive such initiatives once these managers are, themselves, trained to identify the challenges best suited for AR.

In 2017, I expect that some systems integration and IT consulting companies will begin to offer programs that take a methodical approach through the AR use case development process, as part of their services to clients.

Prioritization is Key

How do stakeholders in a company agree on the highest priority content to become AR experiences for their top use cases? It depends. On the one hand there must be consistent AR technology maturity monitoring and, in parallel, the use case requirements need to be carefully defined.

To choose the best use case, priorities need to be defined. If users perceive a strong need for AR, that should weigh heavily. If content for use in the AR experience is already available, then the costs and time required to get started will be lower.

A simple method of evaluating the requirements appears below. Each company needs to define their own priorities based on internal drivers and constraints.

A simple process for prioritizing AR use cases (Source: PEREY Research & Consulting).

Markers Won’t Stick

One of the current trends in enterprise AR is to use markers as the target for AR experiences. Using computer vision with markers indicates to the user where they need to point their device/focus their attention, consumes less power and can be more robust than using 3D tracking technologies in real-world conditions.

However, for many enterprise objects that are subject to sun, wind and water, markers are not a strategy that will work outside the laboratory. Those companies that plan to use AR with real-world targets that can’t have markers attached need to begin developing a new content type: trackables using natural features.

In 2017 more enterprise AR project managers will be asking for SDKs and tools to recognize and track the physical world without markers. For most, the technologies they will test will not meet their requirements. If well managed, the results of testing in 2017 will improve the SDKs as suggested in our post about AR software.

The AR Ecosystem and Technology are Immature

While the title of this post suggests that enterprise content is not in formats and associated with metadata to make AR experiences commonplace, the reverse statement is also true: not all the required AR components are ready for enterprise introduction.

Projects I’ve been involved with in 2016 have shown that while there are a few very solid technologies (e.g., tracking with markers on print), most components of AR solutions with which we are working are still very immature. The hardware for hands-free AR presentation is one area that’s changing very rapidly. The software for enterprise AR experience authoring is another. As more investments are made, improvements in the technology components will come, but let’s be clear: 2017 will not be the year when enterprise AR goes mainstream.

For those who have seen the results of one or two good proofs of concept, there will be many people who will need your help to be educated about AR. One of the important steps in that education process is to participate in the activities of the AREA and to share with others in your company or industry how AR could improve workplace performance.

When your team is ready to introduce AR, call in your change management group. You will need all the support you can get to bring the parts of this puzzle together in a successful AR introduction project!

Do you have some predictions about what 2017 will bring enterprise AR? Please share those with us in the comments to this post. 

Augmented Reality will play an important role in the future of manufacturing, but the details about where, how and who will benefit most are still unclear. The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) is an AREA member that, based on the organization’s collaborative research projects, is developing special insights on these topics.

As a faculty-level unit within the University of Sheffield, the AMRC partners with industry to conduct advanced machining and materials research that brings high ROI. The AMRC with Boeing focuses on manufacturing in aerospace, automotive and other high-value industries while, in parallel, the Nuclear AMRC focuses on manufacturing innovation and supply chain development for the civil nuclear and energy sectors.

We asked the AMRC’s digital manufacturing assembly specialist, Chris Freeman, to shed light on the drivers for introducing Augmented Reality in manufacturing and the risks he sees when Augmented Reality is integrated into projects underway or planned at the AMRC.

How do you identify where and how Augmented Reality can offer value?

We don’t propose any new technology unless we believe that it can address a specific operator requirement.  When our research partners come to us with manufacturing challenges, we make sure we study those problems in relation to not just the senior directive, but also the hands-on operator who performs the job day in and day out. They know the problems best and, often they provide the key metric, or problem around which the application needs to focus. For example, a process may need to be completed with fewer concessions or at a greater rate, but the operator will want to focus on how it will make their own life easier. That operator-level buy-in is crucial to having a successful deployment. Their personal experience in processes needs to be considered just as much as the goals of those senior to them. By presenting solutions that serve requirements of both operator and managers, benefits like traceability or the elimination of errors will more likely be realized.

We might recommend exploring AR as part of a solution when the key business challenge (or the opportunity to reduce costs) involves people interfacing with and using complex instructions or information in context.   

In each scenario we need to closely examine the whole process to help build a preliminary ROI model. We are always looking for robust business cases, where technology integration can deliver a step change because going to the effort to introduce something new for small incremental changes is not going to be justifiable. Even if it is innovative, the technology will not be adopted.

Existing data about operator performance is often not available but we may be able to collect indirect metrics or indicators of efficiency such as the number of rework orders or how much scrappage (waste) a company generates. The details may be extracted from the company’s manufacturing execution system (MES) or standard operating procedures (SOPs). These systems have the ability to gather a lot of detail for other purposes that we can use as part of a study to understand the business case.

Do you use or integrate with real time sensor networks or IoT in any part of your projects?

The vision of Industry 4.0 has always included a component of connected machines communicating with, and being controlled by, systems and humans in intuitive and low-risk fashion. We are being requested to do more projects with the Industrial Internet of Things but, at the moment, it’s still exploratory.

Augmented Reality is a great enabler for humans working with IoT but a great deal of potential value of IoT rests in the architecture and systems that sit behind it. Sensor networks are very powerful, especially when combined with real time Big Data analytics, and the use of Augmented Reality will enable new methods of data visualisation and human interaction.

How is data prepared for use in Augmented Reality experiences in an advanced manufacturing environment?

Ideally there’s no need to introduce a new data manipulation step between the source of the data and the AR experience user, but a lot depends on the use case requirements. We recommend that the AR experience system uses the raw data straight from its source, whenever possible, and not duplicate any existing functionality. We also recommend that the digital content be as close to its native format as possible.

The more complexity there is in data handling or mining, the less robust and less repeatable the process becomes. Translation and optimisation is often necessary but it’s not ideal. In situations where access to data sources is not available, any transformation processes need to be as automated as possible.

To determine how suitable a client’s existing data portfolio is we will always work with the customer’s existing data sources to prove out the process. Often there’s a learning process through which everyone goes, which with our help, allows them to understand what can be achieved with their existing data.

Risk management plays a large role in the process, too. When we’re planning an application, we’re always looking for the key challenges and risks. We examine potential issues and document these to ensure we understand the potential pitfalls.

What are the sources of risk (challenges) when using AR in the manufacturing environment and how do you address them?

With Augmented Reality there are many uncertainties about the technology itself, such as how it works in different environments. We have all sorts of challenges around natural and artificial lighting conditions, wireless network connectivity and many other factors that will impact user interactivity. Manufacturing environments have high levels of ambient noise due to industrial-scale machinery. This noise presents challenges with speech-based recognition interfaces. Selecting the right AR interaction mode for the right task is crucial.

We see rapid change in the features of hands-free displays. This raises uncertainty about how long one model will last before being superseded by a new one. Each change introduces new risks and costs. In order to lower the impacts of frequent model updates, it’s important to first implement a robust back end architecture.  Then, once that’s in place, the AR experience presentation hardware (wearables, tablets, phones, etc.) can be quickly removed and changed without the cost and delays of changing the underlying architecture.

In addition, there are risks associated with different recognition technologies. We have to evaluate image, bar code, natural feature recognition, SLAM and depth sensing with respect to the project goals and the environmental constraints. As integrators, we can also combine AR with well-established technologies such as geo-location sensing, RFID and Bluetooth.

Many of our partners are very security conscious and tightly regulated. Systems purely reliant on cloud-based architectures will not even be considered. Local networks are an option but still very much a problem when a number of organizations we work with don’t (or can’t) have Wi-Fi on the shop floor. This drives us to look at solutions that work entirely offline and then can connect with a data infrastructure after a shift or task is completed.

There are also project risks due to excessively high expectations. In other words, hype. We work with all stakeholders to make sure they are clear and realistic about their goals and match those to what the technology can do today.

What are people’s attitudes towards the adoption of AR and how do you manage those?

It varies highly. Most have done some basic user studies prior to beginning any investment in order to understand the potential for adoption of a new technology. However, the exact process investigated is unlikely to be specific to the one you’re working on. They will be keen to learn more but will want to see tangible metrics around value and ROI. At an operator level, they will probably have little awareness of the technology and so may be cautious about its use and how it will impact their day-to-day life. User engagement and trials are crucial in order to get buy-in at a shop floor level. The operators need to be involved to show that the new technology is helping the end user do their work. Then, the feeling is more open and likely to have positive support. If the presentation system is a hindrance in any way it will be discarded, hence the importance of engaging with all sections of the business.

We always work closely with our partners to educate both ourselves about their use cases, and them about any new technology components. Everyone must have an open mind about the opportunities that AR enables and, as we said, the many risks. We will continue to encourage our partners to use a progressive, value-driven approach to adoption of any new technology. And we look forward to working more with our AR technology provider network, including AREA members, to deliver solutions to address existing manufacturing challenges.

In a blog post last month, Giuseppe Scavo explored the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the growing trend of connected devices in factories. Smart devices and sensors can bring down production and maintenance costs while providing data for visualization in Augmented Reality devices.

Connecting AR and IIoT requires applied research. In this article we’ll look at the EU-sponsored SatisFactory project, which is focusing on employee satisfaction in factories by way of technology introduction.

Innovation in Industrial Production

In 2014, the European Union launched Horizon 2020, a seven-year research and innovation program (ending in 2020) dedicated to enhancing European competitiveness. Horizon 2020 is a partnership between public and private entities and receives nearly $90 billion in public funds. As the program’s website describes, Horizon 2020 aims to drive smart, sustainable and inclusive growth and jobs.

Within this push is the Factories of the Future initiative, a roadmap providing a vision and plan for adding new manufacturing technologies to the European production infrastructure. Objectives of Factories of the Future initiative include:

• Increasing manufacturing competitiveness, sustainability, automation
• Promoting energy-efficient processes, attractive workplaces, best practices and entrepreneurship
• Supporting EU industrial policies and goals

To meet these objectives, ten partner companies and institutions from five European countries founded the SatisFactory consortium in 2015. SatisFactory is a three-year project aiming at developing and deploying technologies such as Augmented Reality, wearables and ubiquitous computing (e.g., AR-enabled smart glasses, etc.) and customized social communication and gamification platforms for context-aware control and adaptation of manufacturing processes and facilities.

SatisFactory-developed solutions seek higher productivity and flexibility, job education of workers, incident management, proactive maintenance and above all a balance between workers’ performance and satisfaction. The solutions are currently being validated at three pilot sites (one small- and two large-scale industrial facilities) pending release for use at industrial facilities throughout Europe.

Industry 4.0

SatisFactory’s vision of Industry 4.0 includes a framework with four sets of technologies:

• Smart sensors and data analytics for collecting and processing multi-modal data of all types. The results of this real time data aggregation will include diagnosing and predicting production issues, understanding the evolution of the workplace occupancy model (e.g., balancing numbers of workers per shift) and enhancing context-aware control of production facilities (e.g., semantically enhanced knowledge for intra-factory information concerning production facilities, re-adaptation of production facilities, etc.).
• Decision support systems for production line efficiency and worker safety and well-being. These systems can take many forms, ranging from Augmented Reality for human visualization of data to systems for incident detection and radio frequency localization.
• Tools for collaboration and knowledge sharing, including knowledge bases and social collaboration platforms. Augmented Reality for training by remote instructors will provide flexibility and increase engagement. Collaborative tools also allow employees to exchange information and experiences, and these tools are combined with learning systems.
• Augmented Reality and gamification can increase engagement. SatisFactory will use tools previously developed by consortium partners and, in pilot projects, explore use of smart glasses and human-machine interfaces. Interaction techniques and ubiquitous interfaces are also being explored.

Pilot Sites

SatisFactory solutions are being tested at the pilot sites of three European companies:

• The Chemical Process Engineering Research Institute (CPERI) is a non-profit research and technological development organization based in Thessaloniki, Greece. The company provides a test site for continuous manufacturing processes.
• Comau S.p.A is a global supplier of industrial automation systems and services and is based in Turin, Italy. The company provides manufacturing systems for the automotive, aerospace, steel and petrochemical industries.
• Systems Sunlight S.A. is headquartered in Athens, Greece, and produces energy storage and power systems for industrial, advanced technology and consumer applications.

In the next post, we’ll look at activities at the sites and how the project is applying Augmented Reality at the different production facilities.

Enterprise Augmented Reality engineers and content managers who published experiences created with Metaio’s software tools have or will soon encounter a situation they didn’t anticipate: the publishing and delivery environments are unsupported and not evolving to take advantage of the latest enabling technologies.

Are you among this group? If so, you are not the only one to find yourself in this uncomfortable situation.

If there was a mandate to continue providing the value of their AR experiences to end users, customers of other AR software providers who are no longer supporting or advancing their platforms with the latest technology innovations hit the same roadblock. Prior to agreement on standards, they could not “port” their experiences to another AR platform. Evaluating and choosing another proprietary AR technology platform, and then investing in re-authoring, testing and re-deploying AR experiences based on their original designs, was the only way forward.

Unfortunately, some of those reading this blog are in this awkward position today.

Successfully addressing the root causes of low AR experience “portability” and the inherent lack of integration or interoperability between AR authoring and publishing systems is an important, highly collaborative process.  Different parts of the AR ecosystem must agree that there are issues, firstly, and then on principles for collaboration. Then, based on shared conceptual frameworks, they must work together towards implementing those principles in their workflows and solutions.

Supporting that collaborative process is the reason I’ve been leading the grassroots community for open and interoperable Augmented Reality content and experiences since 2009.

Is There Really a Problem?

Interoperable Augmented Reality is not a high priority for most people. Only about a hundred people are consistently investing their time in advancing the principles of open and interoperable Augmented Reality. We know one another on a first name basis; many of us compare notes in person a few times per year. Another few hundred people know of such activities but don’t directly invest in meaningful ways.

For most companies, the investment in AR has not been great. A few tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild and deploy a half dozen carefully handcrafted AR experiences is minor by comparison to investments in other enterprise technologies. 

“There’s still too much innovation to begin working on standards,” is another commonly heard refrain. Clearly they haven’t been reading the posts or listening to the presentations made by AREA member IEEE Standards Association, or leaders of other standards development groups. When designed collaboratively and to address interoperability in strategic places, there are many examples of standards doing the reverse.

There are other reasons for many to turn a blind eye to the problems. They are valid for different people to different levels.

This is a Serious Problem

In my opinion, ignoring the lack of open and interoperable Augmented Reality solutions and services is doing everyone a disservice.

The fact that only a relatively low amount of money has been invested to date is a poor justification for investing yet more time and money into building experiences with another proprietary platform, only to have the same scenario in a matter of months or years.

In fact, innovation in Augmented Reality is not what it should be today because many of the best AR developers are building a better mouse trap: smart engineers are working to solve problems that have, for the most part been solved by others, in a different way. Whether it’s for reasons of avoiding encroachment on a third party’s patents or something else, this investment of effort is in highly integrated proprietary silos and at the expense of solving other problems that remain unaddressed.

There are three more serious problems with having only proprietary technology silos and very low use of widely agreed standards for Augmented Reality experiences. The first of these is that enterprises with assets that could be leveraged for AR experiences are unable to integrate production of AR experiences into their corporate workflows. This lack of integration between AR as a method of information delivery and other information delivery systems (e.g., web pages and mobile services without AR support) means we can’t seriously stand before a CIO and recommend they support the development of AR content. What we are recommending requires setting up another entirely separate and different content management system.

In the same vein, the second reason that enterprise CIOs and CFOs are justifiably reluctant to deepen their investment in AR projects is that they cannot deploy modular architectures in which multiple vendors can propose different components. In today’s landscape of offerings, it’s all or nothing. The customer can buy into provider A’s system or that offered by provider B. If provider C comes along with a better option, too bad.

The third reason the lack of standards is a serious problem worthy of your support is closely related to the other two. Deep collaboration between AR-enabling technology vendors (providers of technologies) and service providers is currently very difficult.  They are not working to improve customer outcomes: they are working much more on competing with one another for attention and for the small investments that might be made.

Three serious enterprise AR obstacles that agreements about open and interoperable AR could reduce

1. Low or lack of content or experience portability between proprietary technology silos

2. Strong customer aversion to risks due to vendor lock-in

3. Low cooperation between competitors or ecosystem members to partner for best customer outcomes

This situation with lack of interoperability and fear of vendor lock-in would be addressed if the vendors took a more serious look at possible open interfaces and standards within a larger framework. Conversely, vendors might study new approaches and establish some level of interoperability if they believed that customers would respond by increasing their budgets for Augmented Reality.

This is all very serious.

Another recent development is not helping: it’s clear that some internet and IT giants are paying a lot of attention to AR. The lack of visibility into what highly competitive and successful companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and PTC will do about AR interoperability and integration has cast a very cold spell over enterprise AR adoption.

Their lack of support for standards and their unwillingness (to date) to shed light in a public way on how they will cooperate or how their proposed (future) systems will interoperate is causing so much uncertainty. No CIO or CFO should seriously invest in enterprise Augmented Reality until these companies’ plans with respect to integration and interoperability are clearer.

Progress is Being Made

We should be open to the possibility that 2016 will be different.

Thanks to the dedication of members of the grassroots community, the situation is not as bleak as it could be. A few weeks ago a few dozen members met in Seoul, Korea, to compare notes on progress. SK Telecom, a strong supporter of open and interoperable Augmented Reality, hosted two days of sessions. We heard status updates from four standards organizations that have highly relevant activities ongoing (Khronos Group, Open Geospatial Consortium, IEEE and ISO/IEC). We also received reports from AR developers who are working to advance their solutions to support standards.

The fact that the ISO/IEC JTC1 Joint Adhoc Group for Mixed and Augmented Reality Reference Model is nearing completion of its work is a major development about which I presented in Seoul.

In the spirit of full disclosure: the community of people in support of open and interoperable AR was the environment in which this work began, and I have been a member of that ad hoc group since its formation. If you would like to obtain a draft of the Mixed and Augmented Reality Reference Model, please send me an email request.

We are also seeing increased interest from industry-centric groups. There is a German government supported project that may propose standards for use in automotive industry AR. The results of an EU-funded project for AR models in manufacturing became the basis for the establishment of the IEEE P1589 AR Learning Experience Model working group (which I co-chair). In a recent meeting of oil and gas industry technologists, formation of a new group to work on requirements for hands-free display hardware was proposed.

These are all encouraging signs that some are thinking about open and interoperable Augmented Reality. If you want to monitor the activities of the grassroots community focusing on this topic, and to receive announcements of upcoming meetings, visit this page and register yourself for one or more of the mailing lists.

Have you seen other signs that there is increasing awareness of the problems? Do you know about any new standards that should be monitored by and presented during a future meeting of the grassroots community?