“It’s a good time to be a software engineer. And it’s an even better time to be a software engineer who can build virtual or augmented reality.”

In the past few years, major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have been investing in virtual reality (VR) and its sibling technology, augmented reality (AR). Google just released a new “Live View” option in its popular Maps app that uses AR tech to superimpose information onto your field of vision as seen through a smartphone camera. We’ve seen similar examples of simple AR use cases, like the Ikea Place app, which works with your smartphone camera so you can see what certain pieces of furniture might look like in your house. Google is also continuing to improve its ARCore platform so that almost any phone can do things like measure depth.

Better hardware will undoubtedly unlock a lot of transformative potential for virtual reality — but even more so with augmented reality. Rumors suggest that Apple will release its first AR headset in 2023. Facebook, which sells its own line of Oculus virtual reality headset products, is also betting on augmented reality. Mark Zuckerberg has said he thinks there will be an AR “breakthrough” in the next decade on the technology, and Facebook is investing heavily in the field to be the company to do that. And Microsoft’s new HoloLens 2 is being used for industrial applications like training Airbus cabin crews in virtual airplanes as well as, more controversially, military applications, including helping US soldiers prepare for combat.

The rise of AR

When it comes to the potential of virtual reality technology versus augmented reality, it’s increasingly obvious that AR is where there’s broader popular appeal. While the reach of VR is limited to gamers who wear headsets, major tech companies see VR as a gateway to more wide-reaching possibilities of AR technology. The idea is that AR can reach widespread adoption in our everyday lives, as it does with the new Google Maps feature.

As it stands now, popular AR is app-centric — think Pokemon Go or the Ikea app that lets you envision new furniture in your living room. Both are popular apps, but they’re experiences that you must consciously log into and experience through a smartphone screen. A true AR revolution would be one where the technology seamlessly integrates into our lives without any effort. But the hardware isn’t quite there yet. The gadgets that exist now, like Magic Leap or HoloLens, may be getting closer to the dream of effortless AR, but so far they’ve been proven imperfect for the average human.

It should be noted that anticipation for AR’s big breakout moment has been building for the better part of a decade. Google tried to make AR for everyone — or at least those who could afford a $1,000 gadget — nearly six years ago with Glass, a wearable device that put a small display in front of the user’s eye. The product never reached widespread adoption, though the headset has seen some success in enterprise applications.

Many think Google Glass was ahead of its time, although the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet to justify wearing a Matrix-looking set of glasses on your head all day. With its focus on design and usability, Apple could revolutionize the AR headset space if it indeed builds a product. Others like Microsoft and Facebook are racing to do the same.

Facebook currently has more than 3,000 jobs on its career page with the term “AR/VR.” Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have a total of about 1,000, depending on what variations of AR/VR keywords you use. A Facebook spokesperson said it currently employs “thousands” of people who work on AR/VR and plans to move its AR/VR teams to a new campus that will seat approximately 4,000 employees

“Demand is outstripping supply,” Hired CEO Mehul Patel told Recode.

There’s been a 1,400 percent growth in interview demand for AR/VR engineers in the past year, according to Hired. The company conducted a study that analyzed thousands of listings and companies in its annual state of software engineers report.

The average salaries for these positions in major US tech hubs range from $135,000 to $150,000.

While the growth for AR/VR jobs may seem extreme, Hired said it mirrors the 517 percent annual growth in demand for blockchain engineers in 2018. Last year, however, the demand for blockchain engineers had slowed to 9 percent.

But while the blockchain craze may have slowed down, the number of AR/VR projects is only expected to increase in the years to come. In terms of the promise of big growth, software engineers tend to agree. Some 74 percent of those surveyed in Hired’s report said they think we’ll see the full impact of AR/VR within the next 5 years.

Meanwhile, plenty of other data points show how the technology industry is betting — and spending big — on AR and VR.

In Austria we find a landscape of companies, research institutions and communities that work with these technologies. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of these different organizations, PwC Austria has published the booklet “Austrian XR Landscape”.

In principle, the locations of the XR organizations are spread all over Austria. Geographically, the focus of the XR activities is in Vienna, followed by Upper Austria and Styria. Carinthia, Lower Austria and Salzburg are equally represented. There are no organizations in the booklet that operate in Burgenland, Vorarlberg and Tyrol.

The XRVienna community is located in Vienna, as are two of the four research institutions mentioned in the booklet. The other two research institutions are located in Carinthia and Lower Austria.

The areas of application of immersive technologies are very diverse. Our preliminary flash survey on this topic identified the most relevant areas of application for companies: customer experience, employee training, data analysis and visualization, and sales support. All of these areas can be used in different industries.

In terms of the industry, the focus of nine companies listed in the PwC booklet is on “Development & Consulting”. Six of the companies specialize in real estate applications and four in creative & media.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. According to IDC, the AR/VR market is projected to take off over the next five years with a compound average growth rate of over 75%, growing to over $120 billion by 2022.

The World Economic Forum has convened a Global Futures Council on VR and AR, with members from industry, government, academia, nonprofits, and content studios from around the world, who among them have expertise in public policy, education, art, ethics, computer science, innovation and medicine.

The goal of this piece is to summarize the inaugural work of the council and to highlight opportunities and pitfalls of large-scale VR/AR use.

We should learn from history. Here are five key lessons from the past that should shape our journey towards a more virtual and augmented future.

Various topics are covered in the article along with case studies including

Training using AR and VR of which there are a number of case studies.

Using AR and VR experiences to change attitudes and behaviour particularly around empathy which studies have shown can be more effective than watching movies or doing role-playing exercises.

What makes VR/AR special is its body movements—people turn their heads to see other people, use their hands to grab objects, and their feet to walk around.

Diversified teams – Given that VR/AR is a unique medium, and not just an extension of video games and film, the teams that produce the best applications tend to cross boundaries.

Avoid the downsides and the features of the technologies that produce these downsides can be used for strategic advantage.  Dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles have demonstrated the effectiveness of this Today, after 25 years of research, these products are beginning to emerge in hospitals and healthcare centres.

VR and AR present a significant market opportunity. To realize this growth, industry and policymakers must collaborate to find ways to mitigate the potential negative effects. Our best advice is to start with a problem that needs to be solved, and then decide if VR/AR technology is a fit. Not everything needs to be immersive, and when choosing where to start we should look to the amazing and enduring success cases from the past.

“Augmented reality can help van drivers find the precise address in the most efficient way, tackling road closures, beating traffic, and so on.”

In a fast-paced digital world, 84 percent of customers never repeat purchase from a vendor who has failed to deliver on time — that’s a statistic from a recent survey and it drives Koleva and her team to constantly look for ways to optimize last-mile delivery in a world where the volume and size of e-commerce transactions are skyrocketing year on year.

According to Statista, retail e-commerce sales in APAC grew from US$646.92 billion in 2014 to US$1.49 trillion in 2018 to US$2.34 trillion last year. This year, multiple forecasts suggest that revenues will touch between US$2.7 trillion and US$3.6 trillion this year.

Thanks to the recent coronavirus outbreak, retail e-commerce has spiked significantly just in the first two months of 2020 — making analysts even more optimistic about their forecasts.

Of course, the APAC has been leading the world in terms of retail e-commerce growth at 25 percent (2019), but a global average of 20 percent indicates the accelerated pace of growth, and the urgent need to make last-mile delivery more efficient.

At CES, Here Technologies explained that the company has been using LIDAR (light detection and ranging)-powered imaging devices mounted on cars (called True Cars at Here) that drive around the world, including the APAC, to collect 360-degree information about urban landscape to create maps in augmented reality.

“Using such data, logistics companies can help their on-ground staff to pin-point the exact destination of the parcels they’re carrying. When traffic and other data is factored in, this becomes even more efficient.”

Given the way that logistics companies around the world run their business, even the slightest scalable improvement helps save meaningful sums of money. A one percent improvement in last-mile delivery efficiency could easily result in a saving of more than US$20 million or more for a sizeable operator.

Koleva is passionate about the (unlimited and untapped) potential of augmented reality. She believes new and emerging technologies such as 5G, the internet of things (IoT), and others will play a big role, but ultimately, expects that industry players will be keen and swift to adopt new technologies to optimize last-mile delivery.

“The time to wait and watch has passed, it’s time to leverage digital innovations, it’s time to buckle up and race ahead,” concluded Koleva.

Not only can it bring 3D anatomical learning to life, as noted by medical device company, Proximie, it can help train nurses and doctors in complex situations. Better, according to Fortune, AR can used by surgeons to alert them to potential risks or hazards in surgery.

It can even be used to find patient veins and avoid accidentally sticking a patient far too many times.  As such innovation is improved, the global augmented reality market in healthcare is expected to reach $10.82 billion by 2025 – a growth rate of 36.1% between 2019 and 2026, according to Research and Markets.

All of that is creating sizable opportunity for companies including

• NexTech AR Solutions
• Intuitive Surgical Inc.
• Abiomed Inc.
• Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.
• Abbott Laboratories

Read the full press release on AR in Healthcare detailing those companies.

Without exaggeration, digital transformation is the mainstream of the technological development of the industry. Modern smart manufacturing uses digital and computer technology in all aspects of its work. Almost all processes, from direct control and process control to business planning and workflow, are currently carried out using digital data and digital infrastructure. This raises the need for more security of all technological processes.

Cybersecurity is a set of principles and means of ensuring the security of information processes, approaches to managing security and other technologies that are used to actively counter the implementation of cyber threats.

The modern security paradigm includes:

• Revision of access control models that take into account openness, flexibility and distribution. Models should be based on temporal logic.
• Adoption of virtualization technology as a powerful means of protection, which allows moving from the concept of a “protected system” (from a fixed set of threats) to the concept of “a system with predictable behavior”.
• The implementation of the principle of separation of the information processing environment and the means of protection.
• Building the theoretical foundations of managing dynamic protection (adapting to current threats) as an object of automatic regulation with the concept of a stability zone, aftereffect (inertia) of dynamic characteristics
• Acceptance of the openness of systems (Internet connection) as an inalienable property and the construction of protection with this in mind
• Development of the basics of assessing elasticity (system adaptability) and scalability.
• Development of new principles for detecting attacks, viruses, rootkits, worms, RPS and other malware.
• Taking into account the possibility of using supercomputers to create new attack scenarios, scanning systems, intervention in production management, cryptanalysis.

Industry 4.0 and Technology Areas

The basis for digital transformation is computer technology and digital measuring instruments. Computer technologies in smart manufacturing have gone from isolated “islands” of control systems and office computers to multilevel geographically distributed corporate networks with access control and information security. Due to the development of cloud technologies and data centers, the problem of a limited amount of stored data and computing power is removed.

This enables the large-scale digital transformation of manufacturing industry, which is often referred to in the literature as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 technologies include at least:

• smart manufacturing devices and the industrial Internet of things – the ability to obtain comprehensive data about an object or equipment with their transfer to any other system, usually over wireless networks;
• a digital copy (digital double) – a full description of the object at all stages of the life cycle, including drawings and three-dimensional models in digital form, a model of the process, data on the current process parameters and other important parameters;
• Big data – technologies for working with large volumes of heterogeneous data (time series, events, etc.) in order to analyze and obtain significant information for decision making;
• machine learning and artificial intelligence – a range of technologies for teaching computer systems in order to find dependencies and apply them to decision making;
• cloud technologies and services that allow you to store and process data, perform software services on the infrastructure of the “cloud” located on the Internet or in the corporate data center;
• wireless and mobile communications technologies, mobile devices, and applications;
• Robotics
• virtual and augmented reality;
• additive manufacturing and 3D printing, etc.
• Digital transformation allows us to ensure significant growth in market volumes, increases the competitiveness of enterprise products and solves at a new level the continuously complicated tasks of industrial enterprises. It is vital not to let security threats compromise a significant potential of smart manufacturing.

Organizations mentioned in the article include:

• Pimax
• Bosch (AREA member)
• Pico
• ThirdEye (AREA member)
• LetinAR
• Vuzix (AREA member)
• Nreal
• Cybershoes
• Panasonic
• NextMind
• Qualcomm (AREA member)
• TEGway
• Sarcos Robotics (AREA member)

While XR is undeniably the future of business, many businesses aren’t quite sure where to start. Innovative ideas must be accompanied by managerial buy-in, financial support and a long-term plan, among other obstacles. A smart businessperson not only sees the potential for XR, but knows how they want to use it – and how to sell it to their superiors.

The XR Immersive Enterprise Conference, to be held on May 5-6, 2020 at the Revere Hotel in Boston, USA, is an interactive immersion into the world of extended reality. You’ll learn from the experts that have implemented XR in their companies; you’ll hear the lessons they learned along the way and how those lessons can be applied to your business. You’ll witness case studies across multiple industries. You’ll have the chance to work directly with XR professionals and fine-tune your pitch to management. Best of all, you’ll return home with actual facts and figures you can show your boss as you work towards incorporating XR into your business strategy.

You can join over 300 industry experts and hear from more than 50 thought leaders at the XR Immersive Enterprise Conference. Listen to the case studies of proven XR innovators like Wayfair, UPS and Novartis, discover the business applications of XR and how they can lead to success in your industry, and learn how to sell your boss on the applications, and ROI, of this industry-changing technology.

Don’t miss out on this explosive opportunity to ride the wave of the future. Start thinking about how XR can transform your business today.

For more information about the conference, check out the event website (https://events.vr-intelligence.com/enterprise/) where you can download the brochure and sign up for weekly updates to stay on top of all of the latest XR innovations. Most importantly, save the date – May 5 and 6, in Boston, for the XR Immersive Enterprise 2020 Conference.

In 2017, Microsoft entered the virtual reality (VR) industry with what it called “mixed reality” headsets made by ASUS, Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Samsung. The differentiation of these headsets from early Oculus and HTC Vive headsets was their inside-out tracking, meaning they didn’t need external trackers to locate the headset, but they were still tethered to a computer.

The concept was novel at the time, but operations were glitchy, and Facebook’s Oculus and HTC’s Vive products were superior even at Microsoft’s launch.

Xbox head Phil Spencer squashed the idea of VR for Xbox saying, “Nobody’s asking for VR.” Maybe nobody’s asking for VR, but Microsoft is investing in related augmented reality (AR) technology that customers are definitely asking for.

The VR/AR industry is booming, with market intelligence company IDC expecting growth of 79% to $18.8 billion in 2020. But it’s not consumer products that are expected to drive growth, it’s enterprise applications.

IDC projects that spending in areas like investment services and banking will grow at over 100% annually for the next five years. So enterprise solutions are big business, and that’s where Microsoft sees its opportunity in AR.

Read the full original article here.