The University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, a collaboration between faculty and students in the School of Law, Information School and Computer Science & Engineering Department and other campus units, uses a set of “diversity panels” for evaluating new technologies and to consider the impact of the technology in question on various end users.

The Lab has released its findings of a study on Augmented Reality in a new report. The authors conclude that the greatest legal and policy issues arising from the use of Augmented Reality concern collection and/or display of information. Within these areas, concerns with privacy, free speech and intellectual property as well as novel forms of distraction and discrimination, raise the need for further attention and the development of new recommendations.

The final section outlines five options available to various policymakers who have an interest in promoting or regulating the technology.

Oceaneering International is a subsea engineering and applied technology company based in Houston, Texas that has been exploring the use of Augmented Reality for risk reduction and improved job execution in offshore operations.

In this article published in the November 2015 issue of Offshore Engineer magazine, Mark Stevens and Bob Moschetta provide an overview of the subsea engineering projects that could benefit from Augmented Reality. They provide in-depth descriptions of the use of AR for situational awareness, training and control of equipment. They compare subsea use cases to those suggested by the civil aviation community, such as flight path visualization.

The authors conclude that “increased visualization of how the job is supposed to occur provides the opportunity for the continuous improvement cycle to be used as equipment, process or work instructions can be modified based upon the virtual testing of executing the job, thereby reducing the risk and improving efficiency.”

Construction industry technologists are increasingly exploring the use of wearable devices. This post on the Construction Equipment Guide blog describes the benefits of sensors for context-specific and hands-free wearable displays. Although the example scenario is one using Google Glass, the post points out that smart watches could also play a role in streamlining business processes.

The post continues by describing the role for thermal imaging technologies, new protective equipment, such as the DAQRI Smart Helmet, drones and phablets. According to the post, deployment of smart helmets on the job may improve “productivity, safety and efficiency by allowing project data to be streamed and work instructions to be seen all in the context of the job being done. Sensors can alert a worker to impending danger.”

In this new post on Digi-Capital’s blog, the company announced that has completed the first technical benchmarking of AR/VR head-mounted displays.

There are 26 benchmarks across seven success factors, including:
– Mobility<br/ > – Vision<br/ > – Immersion
– Usability
– Flexibility
– Wearability
– Affordability

The infographic provides suggested targets for each of these factors. It is unclear from the blog post if the company has actually purchased all the models of hardware or if this is purely a desk exercise. More details are available for customers who purchase the company’s 3rd quarter report.

University faculty and students are increasingly studying Augmented Reality-related research topics. Although the scope of what might be included as AR-related research could be the topic of its own dissertation, most recognize that Augmented Reality is a new mode of human computer interaction.

In his doctoral thesis published recently by University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain), Dr. Mikel Salazar proposes a novel HCI model that takes advantage of the new capabilities of Augmented Reality systems to facilitate the construction of user interfaces embedded into the real world. The paradigm Salazar proposes in his thesis allows both developers and end users to create—and share—user experiences beyond those offered with a traditional two dimensional paradigm. Traditionally, the user selects either by pointing directly towards the desired item (in the case of touch-screens and 3D scanners) or by defining a selection box/cursor over it (using a mouse or keyboard).

The new 3D HCI Salazar proposes defines a new basic pointing mechanism. By selecting two points in three-dimensional space (either with a gaze/hand tracking system or, indirectly, with a 3D mouse), the user generates a virtual ray that, once projected onto the virtual scene, determines which objects are to be selected (based on the collision points between the ray and the objects).

Getting good and unbiased information about Augmented Reality in front of large audiences can be challenging. When Fast Company picked up and published a new infographic of the landscape of technology providers offering Augmented Reality it was shared quickly and went viral.

Originally published earlier this month in a blog post by Manatt Digital Media, a professional services provider in this market, the infographic shows interesting data and a landscape depicted as a Venn diagram.

Although not focusing on enterprise uses or technology providers the infographic shows players in the three essential elements of Augmented Reality: content, hardware and software.

During the October 6 and 7, 2015 meeting of the grassroots community of people seeking to advance open and interoperable AR content and experiences, one of the participants, Neil Trevett, President of Khronos Group and VP of Mobile, NVIDIA, shared his summary of the ISMAR 2015 conference.

The participants learned that the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics will begin publishing an annual “AR Edition” containing the ISMAR proceedings. In addition, Trevett summarized three of the science and technology papers that he felt were most interesting:

1. Very High Frame Rate Volumetric Integration of Depth Images on Mobile Devices, summarizing research performed at University of Oxford
2. MobileFusion: Real-time Volumetric Surface Reconstruction and Dense Tracking On Mobile Phones, also conducted at University of Oxford
3. Instant Outdoor Localization and SLAM Initialization from 2.5D Maps, summarizing research performed at Graz University of Technology, Austria

Cockpits are highly-instrumented environments and require a great deal of training to master. Heads-up displays, not to be confused with head-mounted displays, can be used in a cockpit to show the pilot information without requiring them to divert their attention from the windshield and the world outside. The same or similar technology is being incorporated into car windshields for driver information.

Transparency Market Research issued a press release announcing that it has published a new market research report about the results of a recent study on the topic of heads-up display market trends in which in determined that aviation industry would exhibit the strongest demand to adopt the technology in coming years.

In the context of a global HUD market valued at US$ 1.76 Billion in 2014 and forecast to reach US$ 7.05 Billion by 2022, the research also reveals that the key players in the HUD market include BAE Systems plc, Continental AG, Delphi Automotive PLC, Denso Corporation, Esterline Technologies Corporation, Johnson Controls Inc., Microvision Inc., Nippon Seiki Co. Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Rockwell Collins Inc., Thales Group, and Yazaki Corporation.

These companies are well positioned to introduce Augmented Reality-enhanced displays to their existing and future customers.

A significant proportion of what’s commonly called “Big Data” is connected to the real world by way of the technologies embodied in another popular buzzword: the Internet of Things. Some of the data-rich or relevant objects play key roles in the operation of enterprises. Increasing the value and usability of enterprise data pertaining to real world objects through Augmented Reality-assisted visualization is at the core of the AREA’s mission.

A recent review article in the Springer Journal of Big Data researched and written by a team of researchers at the Tampere University of Technology Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering focuses on the intersection of Big Data and human perception. It begins with an overview of Big Data concepts, followed by an equally well-documented review of scientific visualization trends. The authors then delve into the strengths and limits of human perception before turning to the topic of using Augmented Reality.

The article then describes seven important challenges for Big Data visualization with AR and VR and suggests a new research agenda focusing on these challenges.

It is important for enterprise AR developers and project leaders to recognize the wide variety of sources of error that contribute to failed AR experiences or adoption and to mitigate the risks they introduce. Due to variations in sensor manufacturers, some smartphones don’t behave consistently from one unit to the next. Most of the time these differences are undetectable to the user. In the case of gyroscopes and compasses, however, the differences can lead to important discrepancies in how data is presented to the user. Modern mobile operating systems and suppliers use firmware bias to detect and remove or reduce such discrepancies.

According to a post published on the Apple Insider blog, users have found that on iPhone 6s running iOS 9 the sensors produce errors that cause the geospatial Augmented Reality experiences to drift uncontrollably. When users experience such issues to view the stars, they have doubts about application developers and may choose not to explore Augmented Reality technology in the future. But their lives and the equipment with which they work is not at risk.

In the future, users of personal head-mounted displays in enterprise and industrial settings could suffer from similar issues. Choosing hardware suppliers that have developed and use the highest performance sensor reliability test suites could be an important factor to successful adoption and use of AR in enterprise