EPRI is proud to collaborate with the AREA on the first ever Augmented Reality in Leading-Edge Utilities (ARLU) this July, where we will lead the industry to discern a disruptive technology and anticipate and solve issues through collaborative effort. In fact, ours is the only industry we know of where Augmented Reality as a disruptive innovation is being openly discussed. This isn’t going unnoticed.  Other industries are pointing at utilities and saying “Hey, look what they’re doing.”  Utilities are rarely perceived as having an active role in exciting new trends.

Three in One

The ARLU event is, in fact, three events in one.  First, it’s a meeting where EPRI and utilities industry representatives will present their Augmented Reality research and projects to vendors developing applications for the utility industry.  Vendors will see where utilities are placing emphasis in their development efforts and learn about the issues they‘re encountering.  Requirements such as size, weight and battery life of wearable technologies will be explored through the presentations, and will impart to participants a deeper understanding of the issues facing introduction of Augmented Reality in utilities.

Next, vendors will present their latest technologies for immediate feedback from industry experts. Not all technologies fit every utility situation and discussions around fit for purpose of presented technologies will be lively and informative. Finally, a workshop on gaps in existing standards will bring multiple perspectives to the problems of creating safe, comfortable and interoperable AR experiences in the utility space. 

Thought Leaders

Having subject matter experts together in one room is the one of the key objectives of this meeting. As we’ve been preparing the ARLU event, we’ve invited some of the brightest people in the utilities and utilities software industry to mix with thought leaders in Augmented Reality. We expect that the impact will last much longer than the two days in July because new ideas will emerge in the weeks and months that follow as the participants who meet in Charlotte continue to develop relationships.

We expect to capture some of the ideas these thought leaders generate and to share the outcomes of discussions with the broader community so that many others can also benefit.

Time is Right

We feel this is the right time for such a conference. Today, judging a technology for what it can do right now is the wrong way to look at it.  Advances occur almost daily and it’s better to first define what’s needed to build a future state of the technology. That’s where Augmented Reality is today. Practical applications are just now being introduced but an explosion of functionality is coming. By the time the average person notices the ubiquity of Augmented Reality, many of the issues we are going to discuss in Charlotte will already have been settled.

Wearable technologies with Augmented Reality are at a stage where real utility applications are possible. At the same time, shifting demographics at utilities are bringing in younger, less experienced workers—as older, more practiced workers are leaving. There needs to be an orchestrated “changing of the guard” where institutional knowledge, gained by years of hard work and experience, is transferred to a younger, more tech-savvy generation. The technologies presented at ARLU will deliver remote expertise and put information at the fingertips of crews composed of less seasoned individuals.

The wise man says it’s better to act on a lightning flash than wait to hear the thunder. That’s why we planned this event in 2015 and look forward to seeing many of the readers of this blog at the first ARLU event.

This post was previously published on the DAQRI blog and posted here with permission.

As we head into Augmented World Expo 2015, we have seen this event grow and evolve alongside the industry. Within this last year, we’ve seen more mainstream conversations about Augmented Reality than ever before.  As a result of this increased focus, there is now more than ever, a need to support and encourage innovation in Augmented Reality and computer vision technologies.

This year, we are excited to be showcasing our products and to spotlight our recent acquisition of ARToolKit, the world’s most widely used augmented reality SDK.  By releasing ARToolKit professional SDKs under LGPL v3.0 for free use, DAQRI is committing its resources to the open source community in the hopes that (in the words of our founder, Brian Mullins), “we can kick off the next AR revolution and inspire a whole new generation to pick it up and make things that haven’t been imagined yet.”

On the exhibition floor, Ben Vaughan and Philip Lamb from ARToolworks will be available to discuss ARToolKit and DAQRI’s newly-created open source division that they are heading up. In addition, representatives from DAQRI will be demoing DAQRI 4D Studio and showcasing exciting technologies from Melon, our brain computer interface division.

DAQRI executives will also be presenting throughout the conference:

Monday, June 8:

• 10:45 am – 11:30 am—DAQRI 4D Studio Tutorial
  Katherine Wiemelt, Sr. Product Director, DAQRI
• 2:15pm – 3:00 pm—How to Measure Enterprise AR Impacts
  Andy Lowery, President, DAQRI

Tuesday, June 9:

• 11:30 am – 1:00pm—Smart Glasses Introductions
  Matt Kammerait, VP Product, DAQRI
• 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm—Entertainment, Games, and Play
  Brian Selzer, VP Business and Product Development, DAQRI
• 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm—Auggie Awards
  Brian Mullins, Founder and CEO, DAQRI

Wednesday, June 10:

• 2:45 pm-3:00 pm—From Evolution to Revolution: How AR will Transform Work, in the Future
  Brian Mullins, Founder and CEO, DAQRI

In a modern world everyone assumes that power recharges are just a “plug away.” Just plug your device into the next power outlet and your issues are over. Generating and distributing power isn’t magic. It’s an industry.  

Why Do You Care about EPRI?

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) works collaboratively with more than 450 utility provider members and participants internationally to identify or create the technologies that utilities will need to provide affordable, reliable, safe, efficient and environmentally responsible electric power to the world. By leveraging its research and membership, EPRI is helping utilities investigate the benefit of using AR-assisted workflows to improve worker safety and efficiency.

Why Does EPRI Care about the AREA?

Augmented Reality promises to change how electric utilities will operate in the future. Like in electric utilities, strong industry associations are necessary to promote and develop Augmented Reality technologies and standards to the point that they are productive and as easy to use as plugging your device into the socket.

Our experience with introducing new systems into electric utilities is that you can’t get from here to there, from nascent to mature industry, in a single step. You have to have partners and communities. New tools and techniques gleaned from AREA members in other industries can be applied to utilities, reducing the cost of technology implementation for our members in the near term, and the cost of generating and distributing electricity in the long run. Collaborating with AREA members will result in products that better serve the utility industry and the public.

Members of the AREA represent the thought leaders in an emerging technology that EPRI and its members think will be pivotal to increase efficiency and safety for workers among EPRI‘s utility membership.

EPRI is proud to be a Founding Sponsor member of the AREA. Joining AREA and getting it launched successfully is only the beginning.

Bringing Together the Best and the Brightest

In close partnership with AREA, EPRI is going to bring the AR vendor community closer to the utility vendor community.

As a first step, we are organizing a special two-day workshop to be held at the EPRI Charlotte office on July 27-28, 2015. The AREA members and other AR ecosystem stakeholders will present on their position in the market and technology. The utility customers will ask some tough questions about reliability, standards and security. They will go over the best use cases around workflow in the field and asset management.

In a matter of a few short days, these groups will be able to formulate better strategies for improving the operations of utilities without putting assets and people at risk.

We know that this is an important step towards bringing our two industries closer together. Join the AREA to learn the details of this special program and visit the event page for more information about AR in Leading-edge Utilities.

The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance offers a central platform for the Augmented Reality ecosystem to come together in a manner that fosters growth, collaboration and market awareness and development.

This is why the AREA is important for the IEEE as well as for everyone who will use AR in the future. Prior to the AREA, no one has focused on the enterprise AR value chain. In the AREA, those who provide AR solutions and components will improve their processes and products in partnership with their future customers, and customers will be fully engaged in the process of expanding this market.

The Diverse Viewpoints of AREA Members

The Founding Sponsor members of the AREA, including IEEE, seek to bring together the diverse perspectives of the AR value chain in order to provide opportunities for working through common pain points. The resolution of these points will result in a positive outcome for customers, end users and manufacturers. By fostering this level of growth, the AREA is an enticing forum for interested parties to jointly conduct research that supports their organizations’ performance.

Beyond research, the AREA affords its members the opportunity to gain inroads with other organizations that potentially offer them new solutions with diverse stakeholders.

Personally, I’m excited about the opportunity to increase our collective knowledge and educate the marketplace with respect to the impact that AR can have on their businesses’ and customers’ product quality and experiences. From the perspective of advancing technology for humanity, the IEEE Standards Association continues to explore new areas to support technologies that have the potential to impact the world in a positive manner. Augmented Reality offers this possibility in a very important way—and members of the AREA collaborate to show their support of the technology as well as to increase their voice in the market.

Complexity in Emergence

In addition to the benefits AR offers, there are aspects of AR introduction that will be difficult to overcome. The technology is no more immune to themes of cybersecurity, privacy, and identity than other interconnected technologies. Given the pervasive nature of these themes, it is natural that we will, at some point, need to tackle these complex techno-political questions together, as partners in equilibrium with end users.

While resolving cybersecurity, privacy and identity issues is not on the AREA docket in the immediate future, you can imagine the role the AREA will play in the future as an important actor in the AR ecosystem.

Your Role in the AREA

The AREA is now open to all classes of membership. Why should you join?

I encourage you to take a few moments to learn about the AREA’s value proposition to your company and customers. Reflect on how your value chain could benefit from having technology that increases workplace safety and product quality, while reducing manufacturing and operational costs and helping to streamline workflow processes.

Then ask yourself if your company had the chance to educate the market regarding the benefits of AR in the enterprise; would it benefit? What about the chance to be a part of collective, exploratory research that advanced the AR market? If you believe these questions make sense and your company needs to be at this table, then consider joining the IEEE and becoming an AREA member.

I look forward to meeting you at one of our many upcoming events and discussing the important issues that AREA members will be tackling for the benefit of humanity.

Portions of this article were published in SAP Startup Focus in its March 26 newsletter.

Since we began in this field in 2011, countless smart glasses prototypes, working samples and production units have passed through the APX R&D lab. Predating Google Glass, we had developed rapid prototyping capabilities to build smart glasses prototypes using available components. Having entered the smart glasses industry earlier than most, our early engineering efforts were broader than the enterprise software company we have become, with the nascent market necessitating a broader technical coverage spanning all aspects of hardware, software, user interface design, human-computer interaction methods and systems thinking. Dropping smart glasses device engineering and some of the low-level software from our core expertise subsequently opened a path for APX to do more with less. 

Large enterprises across the globe have spent many billions of dollars over decades to build out electronic knowledge bases of information needed to get work done. This means that mission critical data for the deskless and hands-on workforce already exists in the enterprise, and now the imperative is to enable a seamless, bidirectional flow of information between the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) ecosystem and users, while refining user interactions in a contextually aware and intuitive manner. Our Skylight product, an enterprise software platform for smart glasses, helps bridge the gap between enterprise information systems and smart glasses users in need of contextually relevant data, accessible heads up and hands free smart glasses.

Our skill today is in keeping up with rapidly changing technology. To illustrate how challenging this can be, let’s look back at the different hardware options available to the enterprise customer. I hope this visually guided tour of smart glasses marking milestone moments within APX’s history demonstrates how quickly technology has advanced in a short period of time, and brings excitement and anticipation for a diversifying ecosystem of emerging devices continuing the next industrial revolution driven by wearable technology.

US Army Smart Glasses, Multiple Generations (2011-2013)

Our company’s history goes back to when we were originally selected to build software for smart glasses used by the United States Army. The biometrics application, nicknamed Terminator Vision, used the onboard camera to capture faces within the soldier’s field of view, send the captured data to a server to determine the identity of the person(s) and display the information in a heads-up and hands-free manner to the user.

Advanced for its time in terms of delivering a fully embedded, single-device-does-all smart glasses solution, these smart glasses featured an end-to-end exchange of field-collected data from the user’s environment, which was analyzed by a back-end system and delivered to the user in real time.

Augmented Reality Smart Glasses Prototype (Late 2012)

In 2012 we broadened our software capabilities to address the non-military market targeting global companies with a deskless and hands-on workforce. We commissioned several prototypes to learn more about the nuances of the ideal hardware for enterprise smart glasses. The ones pictured above used two display modules, each containing a microdisplay, a rudimentary 50:50 beam splitter (light from the environment and the microdisplay are mixed evenly to create visible content to the user), and an illumination source. A 3D printed and painted frame for the headset was designed in-house along with the control module enclosure.

This particular prototype allowed us to experiment with different content presentation options (2D, ultrawide 2D and stereoscopic 3D modes), sensor payloads (visible and infrared camera, motion tracker, microphone, etc.) and computing platforms. It demonstrated there is no single perfect design covering all industrial scenarios and confirmed that enterprise smart glasses follow the same paradigm as all other tools used in the workplace—the right tools or glasses for the right job. 

Epson Moverio BT-100EC Prototype (February 2013)

For APX’s first prototype for the Epson Moverio BT-100, we added a 9-axis inertial measurement unit (accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer) coupled to an Arduino platform, along with a 5MP camera and microphone module enclosed in a 3D-printed module. This in turn was wired into a daughter board for Epson’s control unit containing a battery, a video signal converter, and a USB hub. Finally, we used an Android phone for additional control and management.

This prototype represented a milestone at APX—we  had the ability to produce devices inexpensively for our developers, partners and customers, albeit in a limited fashion (inexpensive at the time meant $3,000-5,000).

Made famous by coverage on and by demos at the YouTube Sandbox at Google I/O 2013, this cemented our presence in the industrial sector with one of the first Epson-derived prototypes. Essentially a functionally equivalent prototype to Epson’s BT-200 smart glasses released a year later, this was the first device APX prototyped in our partnership with Epson.

Google Glass (April 2013)

The release of Google Glass was a milestone for the smart glasses industry for many reasons, not least of which because one of the largest technology companies in the world had introduced a fully integrated smart glasses device at the relatively modest price of $1500. This sparked significant interest from startups, venture capital and large corporations. Overnight, smart glasses went from being exotic devices reserved for researchers and the military to publicly available goods.

The Glass product announcement in 2012 led to the acceleration of the development of and spurred others to take a deeper look at the nascent industry. Google’s entry had ripple effects in the hardware industry as well, considerably increasing the pace at which companies have introduced new devices since.

APX’s vision has always been that smart glasses will fundamentally transform the way the global workforce will build, fix and move goods, delivering enhancements in productivity, efficiency and safety. Glass’ innovations and the market presence it created represented an important step in that direction.

Glass of course has seen its ups and downs, recently bringing the consumer- and app developer-facing Explorer program to an end, but the Glass at Work program, of which APX was the founding partner in April 2014, continues to thrive.

Vuzix M100 (December 2013)

Vuzix is a very well-known name in the smart glasses industry, having developed see-through displays since 2005 (not surprisingly, also for the military). Its M100 product was the first industry-targeted generally available device, complete with an ANSI-rated safety glasses attachment, and has since paved the way alongside Google Glass in setting the standard of heads-up and monocular smart glasses.

APX and Vuzix have an official partnership with the M100 integrating the fourth release of Skylight and increasing the selection of devices available for enterprises to deploy across a diverse set of use cases.

Epson Moverio BT-200 (March 2014)

Epson’s second-generation Moverio product incorporates the sensors we had added to the BT-100EC prototype and are the first generally available stereoscopic see-through smart glasses. The device also integrates Skylight for industrial AR use cases such as two-way video conferencing and workflow information in the worker’s field of view.

These use cases were demonstrated live at SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s SAPPHIRE 2014 keynote address, marking a decisive change for smart glasses in enterprise, with the technology being publicly demonstrated by a major ERP player at its largest conference. With a suggested retail price of $699, the low cost of the device provided additional incentives for enterprises to pilot and experiment with the technology for their workplace scenarios.

Sony SmartEyeglass (February 2015)

Since early 2014, Sony has showcased several iterations of the SmartEyeglass concept at multiple industry conferences. At the 2015 Consumer Electronic Show, Sony, APX and SAP Startup Focus partnered together to demo an enterprise smart glasses solution. Sony provided the hardware for the smart glasses, SAP provided ERP data from Work Manager and HANA and APX’s Skylight furnished the user experience that extended the data to wearable devices. This combination enabled user-context awareness, mobile device management and information security rule enforcement, and brought advanced media to and from users equipped with smart glasses.

Recon Jet (March 2015)

Although the Jet smart glasses product from Recon Instruments is produced primarily for the sports industry, we believe its design balancing wearability, user comfort, function, robustness and price will have a positive influence on future smart glasses designs for enterprise. The Jet has attributes that are desirable for enterprise applications: a sleek and easily wearable design that can withstand harsh outdoor environments, consumer level pricing and availability, and an interchangeable lens design.

What’s Next?

In only four years, smart glasses technology has evolved from being a research prototype, limited in capability, availability and high cost to being broadly accessible, wearable and enterprise ready. We have seen growing interest from the largest global companies in building the connected workplace for their deskless and hands-on workforce, and we believe the market for smart glasses is just getting started.

Going back to the beginning of our product timeline, we initially invested heavily in smart glasses because we recognized their potential suitability to enterprise use cases. The latest version of our Skylight product is scalable, connects to enterprise data sources and supports commercially available models of smart glasses. We are also preparing for emerging trends that will interconnect smart glasses with other mobile devices. With smartwatches taking center stage in 2015, we are extending Skylight support to a growing wearable ecosystem.

We can’t be more excited, both by how far we’ve come and where we’ll go as the wearable market takes off in the enterprise.  We’re also very excited to work alongside an industry full of partners, customers, and research institutions as a founding member of the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA).  The enterprise smart glasses market requires active participation of the full value chain of enterprise mobility.  Device manufacturers, software developers, system integrators, consulting agencies, academic and research institutions will all need to collaborate to deliver on the needs of customers.  There is an elevated sense of personalization that smart glasses and other wearable devices bring to users, and defining the optimized user experience will be a critical task for everyone in the industry.  While improving the user experience and capabilities of our own product line, we recognize that the evolution of the entire enterprise smart glasses value chain requires contributions from an entire industry.

The insights gathered from collaborating with other AREA members will help improve the quality of the experience for our customers, developers and partners.  APX is striving to work with fellow visionaries to accelerate the adoption of enterprise smart glasses technology, generating ripple effects much greater than the mere sum of the AREA members’ capabilities.

Much has been made recently of how Augmented Reality will soon merge our digital lives with our real ones, bestowing new powers to our social and working existence. Recent advances in technology have lulled us into believing that AR in the workplace is just around the corner. Many of us have looked forward to high-tech glasses, watches and other wearables finally delivering that promise, inspired by viral YouTube videos (here, and here ) showing workers wearing glasses with full field of vision AR displays. However, this has yet to materialize.

The recent withdrawal of Google Glass and the general failure of wearables to meet expectations have influenced public perception of enterprise AR as falling rapidly from Gartner, Inc.’s Peak of Inflated Expectations into the Trough of Disillusionment. 

AR Is a Natural Fit for Solving Plant Floor Challenges

Gartner has pigeonholed AR technology into the digital marketing niche. This is possibly the result of highly visible and successful AR brand engagement campaigns, such as for sports teams, automobile companies and even business-to-business marketing. The Augmented Reality feature provided in the IKEA catalog companion application demonstrates how AR can be useful as well as drive consumer brand engagement. These campaigns and useful applications primarily address the outward-facing communication needs of the brands and are measured in terms of greater sales or customer loyalty.

Turning towards business operations, those of us involved in the manufacturing and automation field see AR as a way to address many plant floor challenges. Here are a few examples of common plant floor issues, which we believe are a natural fit for enhancement with mobile AR.

Table: Potential AR Solutions to common plant floor problems

It’s very tempting for an engineering team to develop an eye-catching AR application for a demonstration and to suggest that the technology also easily addresses more complex problems. These solutions are usually implemented by experts using software toolkits, rather than implementing commercial off-the-shelf software. The final implementations delivered for the customer are usually highly customized. In these cases, ROI is difficult to define. iQagent’s approach to solving plant floor problems with AR involves first focusing on the problems to be solved, and then defining a good mobile AR solution to address the challenge.

Interventions are Collaborative Endeavors

One challenge we address is #4 from the table above: technical resources required to evaluate and efficiently respond to unplanned downtime events are not available in real time.

Production downtime costs are often measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars per minute. When a production line goes down, the operator must communicate with remote technical resources in order to get production running again quickly. One factor preventing effective communication is the education gap between the operator and engineer; operators aren’t engineers, and engineers aren’t used to operating the equipment through all phases of the process. Each has specialized technical and procedural knowledge that can contribute to a solution, but traditional channels such as phone, text or e-mail aren’t perfect tools for collaboration. The operator must decide which details are important to convey to the engineer, and the engineer must find the right questions to ask in order to get a clear picture of the problem. Due to the prohibitive cost of production downtime, this effort has a very small window in which to be effective. At some point, the decision must be made to get the human resource on-site in order to return the line to normal production.

We then considered why engineers and operators are more efficient in resolving production downtime issues when collaborating in person. The operator can directly show the problem to the engineer, referring to live process values and performance indicators relevant to the process from the local automation system. The engineer can analyze the problem in real time, asking the right questions of the operator in order to resolve the problem.

A successful mobile solution duplicates the benefits of in-person collaboration, allowing each participant to effectively contribute their specialized knowledge to a common view of the process, including live data and operational details from the automation systems that are relevant to the problem.

This particular solution is a great fit for AR-enhanced software on a mobile device.

Augmented Reality with iQagent

iQagent uses the device’s video camera to identify a unique piece of equipment by scanning a QR code. The software overlays relevant process values and associated data on the camera’s displayed video feed, which can also be recorded as a snapshot or video. This provides a common view of the process required. Operators can also annotate directly on the images or video, making notes and drawing attention to areas of interest for the engineer to analyze, in effect “showing” the problem. When finished, the user saves and e-mails the video to the remote technician, who now has a much more complete picture of the problem, and in many cases, can resolve the issues more efficiently.

We feel iQagent is a great solution to some common plant floor challenges. But having a great product isn’t an end but a beginning. To make any product a success, you have to get it in front of users who need it, and you must support and continually improve the product. This is why we joined the AR for Enterprise Alliance. The AREA enables us to collaborate with other like-minded AR solution providers, end users and customers. Through education, research and collaboration, we will help to move AR out of the Trough of Disillusionment, up the Slope of Enlightenment and onto the Plateau of Productivity.

Augmented Reality (AR)-enabled systems show a mechanic how to repair an engine, or perhaps in the future will guide an inexperienced surgeon in a delicate heart operation. In my opinion, it’s when AR is combined with human collaboration that the magic begins. AR will soon work its way into a variety of applications that are bound to improve our lives, but more importantly, I am convinced it’s to become a catalyst for greater human understanding and world peace.

Augmented Reality Can Bring Us Closer

Everyone’s heart raced when Jake Sculley, the wheel chair-bound Marine in the movie Avatar, first connected his thoughts to those of his avatar, walked and then ran. His mission was to infiltrate the society of the natives, learn their customs and, having gathered that information help destroy their world. Of course, we all know how the story ends…It’s difficult to do harm to those we know. The first step in Hitler’s campaign to eliminate those he considered unworthy was to convince his followers that the others were less than human. In fact, this is a universal technique involved in incitement to violence against another group. It is only when we finally get to know someone that, even if we don’t agree, we can begin to understand and care about them.

Sharing Experiences

AR allows a user to see an enhanced view of reality, placing graphic images and 3D models over the real background. This will be great for building and repairing things by ourselves, but when we combine that capability with modern telecommunications, remote users will be able to participate in those processes with local users in real time, and appear to the wearer of the glasses as if standing alongside them. We won’t just see our grandkids in a Skype screen; we will take them with us on new adventures around the world or in our backyard. An astronaut in space will literally see the hand of the equipment specialist on earth pointing to the board to be replaced as they speak.

Gutenberg changed the world because the printed page could easily display the manuals that apprentices used for learning the trades that freed them from the fields. Radio and then television added sound, motion and recently 3D to the flood of information. Telecommunications has brought the cost of distributing it to practically zero. Now AR combines these capabilities and creates an infinite number of parallel worlds that you may create and visit, as well as acquire skills in from one-on-one instruction. It’s the closest thing to teleportation this side of Star Trek.

Non-verbal communication is said to account for between 55 and 97% (depending on the study) of communication between people. AR will provide practically the same information due to its enabling of “belly to belly” proximity. You will be able to virtually sit in a conference room and interact with other remote participants, watch a theater performance in your living room or tag along with a friend on an exotic trip to a foreign land. That friend will be able to see you, too.

New Ways of Displaying Information

Talk about disruptive. This is downright neutron bomb material. Why do you need a laptop or tablet when you see the screen suspended in mid-air, with the glasses projecting a keyboard on any surface? Gone are large-screen TVs, when everyone sat stationary watching the game from the same angle. Why wouldn’t they prefer it in perfect 3D? Forget glass cockpits in airplanes; why not have all the instruments projected in your field of view? How about infrared images of deer or pedestrians in fog or at night shown on the windshield of your car, to avoid hitting them in time?

Augmented Reality and Collaboration

But, again collaboration use cases will take the cake. The level of empathetic bonding that occurs when you’re in the room with another person will make current social messaging seem like sending smoke signals. Professionals in other countries will virtually know you and work together on projects as I am proposing using the Talent Swarm platform. Along with such proximity-enabled work will come a better understanding of other countries and cultures.

Collaboration is key, but it can’t happen at scale if everyone needs to buy and use exactly the same hardware and software. Collaboration across networks and companies as diverse as the places where humans live and work builds upon deep interoperability. Interoperability with existing and future systems will require a globally agreed-upon set of open standards. We will work within the AREA to strongly advocate for interoperable systems and push for global standards together with other AREA members. Once we have collaborative AR platforms, the benefits of this technology will rapidly serve all people of the world. Becoming an AREA founding sponsor member is, for Talent Swarm, not only common sense, but putting a stake in the ground, demonstrating our leadership for a more productive and peaceful world. We will avoid embarking on another wasteful battle such as VHS vs. Beta, nor allow a single company to reduce the opportunities or lock others out. Christine Perey, Executive Director of AREA, refers to it as our mandate: to ensure that an ecosystem of AR component and solution providers is in harmony with the customers’ needs, and able to deliver the diversity and innovation upon which economic success is based.

Path to the Future

With a concerted group goal centered on the advancement of AR, and with many technological developments both in the works and being introduced at an increasingly fast pace, we will one day look back to 2015 and say, how did we ever get along without Augmented Reality?

AREA member EPRI will be hosting its first European Engagement Summit on April 28 and 29 in Madrid, Spain. Executives from European utility companies will be in attendance at this invite-only conference to learn about a variety of topics in cyber security and information technology.

Presentations on the following utility industry topics will include:

• Augmented Reality in utility operations
• Risk management in the electric sector
• Security posture assessment
• Network and system management
• Threat management
• Advanced metering systems
• Communications in demand response and distributed energy resources

AREA executive director Christine Perey will be presenting on the state of the art of Augmented Reality in 2015, and what is possible with the available technology. She will examine the macroscopic trends that propel advancements in Augmented Reality today, including how new components introduced in the past six months can contribute to the most powerful solutions ever developed. She will also address the internal and external barriers that remain to be overcome before AR can reach its potential impact in utilities and in all industries.

The conference will be held at the InterContinental Madrid and will be followed by a tour of the Gas Natural Fenosa Control Center.

Look out! Your travel schedule is already overloaded but there are new events where the topic of enterprise Augmented Reality is front and center. There are also events that in previous years have not treated the topic at all but are now sitting up and paying attention. How do you choose where to put your resources?

Tough Choices

In the long run, Augmented Reality will be part of all industries. In the AREA, our mandate is to make sure that this prediction will come true and the projects of our member organizations, regardless of their industry, are successful and bear fruit.

Customers—the buyers and those who will deploy Augmented Reality in their workflows—are already “in” their industry. They know their suppliers and customers. They also have some use cases where they’re thinking AR will be valuable.

Providers of technologies to be deployed in industrial and enterprise environments, on the other hand, are scattered. Under the guise of trying to be responsive, many companies offering AR-enabling systems fail to become experts in the problems and opportunities of a specific industry.

Automotive. Aviation. Construction. Engineering. Aerospace. Defense. Energy. Utilities. AR introduction and adoption won’t happen at the same speed in all industries. Automotive is probably ahead of all the others, but will it hold that lead? For how long?

Which industries are going to embrace AR in a really serious way soonest?

If you’re a provider of AR-enabling systems and have not already developed a sales force affiliated with an industry or just a few related industries, it’s time to do the soul searching you’ve been putting off. This doesn’t mean just looking at the total size of the industry or flipping through your contacts on LinkedIn to find someone that’s prepared to introduce you to the five top CTOs in an industry.

Scanning   

Take the time and in the first half of 2015, invest your resources to better understand industries and domains that you already know as well as those out of your comfort zone. One way to do this is to attend conferences to which an AR topic has recently added to the agenda. For example, the AREA’s calendar of events includes the World Air Traffic Management Congress in Madrid, the Bosch ConnectedWorld conference in Berlin and the CeBIT exhibition in Hannover. 

We’re going to meet people who are gathering in these places. They’ve probably got some major questions about what to expect, some fuzzy areas between AR and VR, and they’re looking for experts. If you are there as well, they may very well find you.

Some companies with a new product to showcase, like AREA member DAQRI, are organizing their own event and inviting their prospects to visit them. This strategy has real benefits because the host can control the message and those to whom the latest developments are revealed. On the other hand, it is unlikely to reach people who aren’t already on your list of prospects. The vendor-hosted event also has the drawback that the conversation isn’t focused on an industry’s pressing needs and greatest opportunities. Finally, those prospects you’ve gathered also sense that they are not sampling the full range of options. By attending one vendor’s event, like Metaio’s InsideAR or DAQRI 4D Expo, customers know that they are only getting what their host wants to put on the menu. 

Balancing Act

So, before you rush out to the airport to yet another conference or tradeshow, consider the year as a whole and develop a balanced approach: a mixture of horizontal “AR-specific” events and those domain- or industry-specific events. Also consider mixing small events with very big ones. They will yield different types of relationships and your business is likely to benefit from having both.

Few trade shows and exhibitions compete with the annual Consumer Electronics Show in sheer magnitude. Over 170,000 people, including representatives of six AREA member companies, gathered between January 6 and 9, 2015, to see and touch the latest real (as well as imaginary) high-technology products first hand.

 Main Attraction

While CES is large in size, the prepared visitor can find and focus on the latest in specific segments. For example wearable technology, fitness, optics, cameras, robotics and automotive gadgets. For AREA members, the primary reason to attend CES is to try on — and, for Augmented Reality providers, to help potential customers to explore — options across the entire gamut of optical see-through hands-free displays for Augmented Reality before ordering prototypes and developer kits.

The growth of the optical see-through hands-free display product category was very rapid in 2014. As a customer, gathering information about products from web pages, brochures and media reports is insufficient. Research must include actually trying on hardware and speaking with product team members. If you’re not the largest automotive or airplane company in the world, these devices and teams do not come to your facilities.

After actually donning more than one optical see-through display it becomes clear that there’s a huge spectrum of experiences possible. Even one model of hardware can “feel” very different and support different use cases. Going from one station to the next in a pavilion such as those organized by Sony and Epson, and using the same device running different software offers a glimpse into the possible range.

Providing this hands-on experience to a wide variety of potential customers in a single place is what makes it important for software developers targeting these platforms and devices to participate and attend CES as well.

AREA members APX Labs and NGRAIN demonstrated in partner booths. Other companies manning stations nearby included Scope, XOEye Technologies and Metaio. Elsewhere at CES, ODG, Optinvent, Atheer Labs, Seebright, InfinityAR, FOVE, and Vuzix demonstrated optical and video see-through AR displays in their own dedicated stands. DAQRI and Technical Illusions, maker of CastAR, hosted guests and conducted demonstrations of their pre-release hardware and software in private suites.

Component Comparisons

For other CES visitors (including those who are considering or already embarking on integration of their own hardware-based solutions) meeting with providers of enabling technologies such as chip sets, power storage and transmission components, sensors and sensor hubs can help define the spectrum of choices before making recommendations or purchasing decisions.

For EPRI, an AREA member attending CES 2015, the challenge was to identify possible wearable computing platforms for field agents. Some field agents will be able to use wrist bands. Others may find efficiencies with 3D scanners and 3D printers.

There was no shortage of booths to visits and companies offering new technology to discover in domains adjacent to Augmented Reality at CES 2015.

AREA Mixer

Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps. After CES exhibition hours, business continues as people gather in the streets and in all the popular entertainment venues. The AREA hosted a reception of members and companies focusing on enterprise Augmented Reality in the Marriott Las Vegas, a short distance from the Las Vegas Convention Center.

All the AREA members at CES had representatives on hand to meet and greet guests including executives and engineers from OPTIS, SAP, Bosch, SmartReality, ZigBee Alliance, Vuzix and Epson. The first AREA case studies were shared with visitors as were AREA plans for growth.

As this organization grows it’s not difficult to imagine having a greater presence at CES and a large group of companies participating in a CES enterprise AR mixer in the future.