It’s no secret that there will be some serious patent issues to be worked out around wearables and Augmented Reality over the next few years. This detailed analysis published on the IFI Claims Patent Service Portal uncovers some 35,755 patent documents filed in the general domain of wearables since 2004. Of these 140 also address Augmented Reality. Among the leading companies (owning more than 70 patents) are Pantech, Samsung Electronic, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Siemens, and Nokia. The questions are who is going to be holding the best and most defensible claims when the rubber meets the road and how long will it take for these assets to matter.

Enterprises have business cases that could save billions of dollars—especially for specific industries and certain types of workers. Accenture Technology Labs believes wearable displays will begin with companies, not consumers. This study compiles the company’s latest findings on the topic of hands-free displays and Augmented Reality.

During the SAP 2014 SAPPHIRE event in Orland, Florida, a panel included Bosch global mobile architect Sascha Markus. Markus asserted that IoT will be one of the biggest trends driving new innovations in industries like manufacturing.

“In five years we’ll see new device types, watches, glasses, anything you can imagine that will all be connected and sharing and bringing information to users,” he said. “This is great as connected devices have the potential to help our users and customers in a lot of ways.”

Markus highlighted Bosch’s success deploying Android smart glasses to its warehouse workers as proof of the industry potential for wearables and connected devices.

“We saw in our production sites we had lots of paper processes and had 150 SAP installations. With this setup, our workers just had desktops and were still printing off work orders, going to the warehouse and physically scanning the items there. This is not efficient,” he said.

“We thought, ‘let’s add smart glass to increase productivity and remove the paper process.’ We now provide workers with a smartphone and an Android smart glass to execute the process in the warehouse and have seen great success. Augmented Reality is the next step in industries like this.” Read more in this blog post.