See the full press release.

Bühler Consumer Foods was established in January 2019, integrating the Haas Group and the original consumer foods business of the Bühler Group. The Haas Group has been a customer of XMReality’s since 2016. Bühler Consumer Foods now expands its agreement with XMReality and enables users from other businesses from within the Bühler Group to use the solution in Asia. Bühler Group will do an initial roll-out in Asia to enable their helpdesk staff support both their own mobile workers as well as including XMReality Remote Guidance into their remote service offering.

“Thanks to the positive experience we have made within our Consumer Foods business and the good partnership with XMReality we decided to expand our pilot project and will use the new support tool for customer service in Asia”, says Manfred Götz, CIO of Bühler.

“XMReality highly values existing customer relationship with Bühler Consumer Foods and we are excited to support the expanded partnership with the Bühler Group. International roll-outs, and the extended focus on reselling our solutions as part of customer service offerings is a developing trend we see amongst our customers”, says Johan Castevall, CEO XMReality.

The order includes XMReality Remote Guidance software, XMReality Web Client, and XMReality PointPad™. The software value is approx. 0,5 MSEK annual recurring revenue and will be recognized during 2019. Including this additional order, total order value from Haas Group during last 12 months amounts to approx. 1,0 MSEK.

It seems possible that the adoption of smart glasses by consumers may resemble that of computers: The mainframes used in the early days of computing were extremely expensive, and were strictly owned by companies. But as technology improved, computers became increasingly ubiquitous at workers’ desks. The PC revolution completed the process, leading to computers being found in the vast majority of American homes.

Augmented-reality smart glasses are likely to retain their foothold as something owned and used by businesses in the industrial sphere, where high prices aren’t a deterrent, ROI is easy to measure, and narrowly defined use cases are a benefit, not a disadvantage. But the work being done now in the industrial world will all be put to use as tech companies try to figure out how to build augmented-reality smart glasses meant to be worn to the coffee shop and not strictly on the shop floor.

How Toyota Stopped Using Paper to Paint Cars

At Toyota’s car manufacturing plants, painting is a matter of precision, which is where AR can be extremely useful.  The case at Toyota is walked through in detail in the article including the original problems and how these were resolved with the use of Microsoft HoloLens.

“This improvement — this kaizen — meant we were able to eliminate the time to place the piece of paper on the car,” says Kayano. A process that used to require one day and two employees now takes just four hours for one employee to complete.

Kayano sees augmented reality being used throughout the Toyota manufacturing process, but it also represents something he’s spent decades thinking about. “I have been working on using digital data for engineering for 20 years,” he says. “It was my dream to be able to see in the real world what I had seen on the computer screen. Hololens was actually a dream come true for me.”

A host of other companies beyond Microsoft and Alphabet have developed niches for augmented-reality smart glasses within the industrial world. Epson has built smart glasses designed for use by professional drone operators which allow them to keep an eye on the drone and also see what the drone itself is “seeing” in a single glance. Vuzix smart glasses are designed to help keep supply-chain information in front of workers’ eyes while they’re in the warehouse. The DAQRI Smart Helmet helps architects and designers visualize their work in 3-D space.

Who knows when the futuristic world of consumer smart glasses promised by the first Google Glass ads will come? Major innovations in hardware, connectivity speed, style, and comfort will all be required before you can pick up a pair of shades that will give you Terminator vision. But in order for those innovations to be achieved, there has to be a context in which smart glasses are both useful and economical. And for right now, that’s the factory.

At first, this meant that work orders for a new piece of equipment coming down the line would be inspected on stationary computer monitors, but this meant employees were often walking back and forth between the monitors and what they were working on, wasting steps and time. In an effort to eliminate this back-and-forth, employees were given tablets meant for the factory floor. But tablets had a major flaw: Workers needed to have both hands free to work on machinery. Not only was holding onto the tablets a safety issue, it also meant workers would set the tablets down wherever was handy, leading to a lot of dropped tablets.

Gulick began to look into using Glass for Enterprise, an effort by Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google, to use what had been sold to consumers as Google Glass for business applications. She quickly found a lot to like. Workers were able to keep both hands free while using Glass. They could use their voice to control Glass, whether to take pictures to send to a supervisor or to go back a page on their work orders.

“If you drop and break a pair of Glasses, the worst-case scenario, it’s $1,500. If you buy a rugged tablet and drop it on the floor and run over it with a tractor, it’s $4,000.

So, that was a pretty easy business case to bring to my leadership,” says Gulick. A pilot program began with just six pair of Glasses, and the results were encouraging from the start.

“Our measurements came back in at 30 percent process improvement, 50 percent reduction in training time, 30 percent improvement in quality processing time,” says Gulick. They quickly upped their order to 100 pairs of Glasses.

Now, line workers at the Jackson plant spend much of their days wearing Glasses. “For our line workers, we consider Glass to be a part of their uniform. They wear gloves, they wear a helmet, they wear ear protection, and they have Glass,” says Gulick. “We really consider it to be a 40-hour-a-week tool. With 12 to 13 hours of battery life, they can easily make it.” Workers charge their smart glasses overnight, and put them back on in the morning.

Now, many new workers hired by AGCO are being trained to use Glass, whether their specific job will require them to use the smart glasses or not. What’s more, Gulick says the ability of Glass to provide easy-to-follow instructions in a worker’s field of view changes who they hire.

“You don’t have to hire a mechanic or someone [with] that background,” says Gulick. She foresees AGCO being able to use augmented-reality smart glasses for training and on-the-floor oversight that will significantly expand the labor pool the company hires from. “The untapped workforce in manufacturing is women.”

These are two examples of how AR, which uses codes to overlay virtual elements on real-world objects, is changing the way we do business—including for the talent development professional. To use AR, the user points their smartphone, glasses, or headset at an object; the AR-enabled device downloads information about the scanned object, which the user is able to control from a touchscreen, through gesture, or by voice. The many uses include accessing up-to-date instructions, viewing the steps to assemble a device, or working with others to solve puzzles or obtain new knowledge.

Tips on designing successful AR learning from the article are:

First, find a business case. As with any new development initiative, especially one that includes a fairly significant monetary cost, a strategic case is needed. It should be noted that not all AR programs require a large investment—some can be utilized with smartphones or tablets; that is, without headsets or glasses. Questions to think about: Do you want to use AR in your onboarding program, for example, to help show employees around the organization? Or, perhaps you want to use it in your healthcare setting, to train and reduce the number of vein sticks through AccuVein’s AR tool?

Pilot and determine production needs. As with other programs, piloting the AR learning initiative will help determine snags and challenges to the program before expanding to a larger audience. Many of AR’s costs are found during the initial production, so to get the biggest bang for the buck consider using AR in a program with evergreen content that can be used with a large group of employees.

Further, if opting for a use that allows learners to be hands-free—that is, via glasses or helmet—costs likely will be higher. Is there room in the budget for such an endeavor? You may need to start smaller.

Define learning goals. Having chosen the business case is a step in the process, but you still will need to determine the end goal. Is it performance support? Are you trying to enhance a manual, hands-on task?

Consult with IT. “Your organization may have security or data integrity policies in place that you’ll need to work around to experiment with the AR technology,” writes Richards. How will IT’s workload be affected by your intended AR initiative? Finally, both IT and the organization’s legal team will need to know what kind of learner data is being collected as part of the program.

Measure results and iterate. What will success look like? Will you collect data about time spent with the device? Or will success be quantified by how many users accessed the AR-enabled experience? Watching users, too, will help determine whether the program is as user-friendly as you’d like it to be. And giving new users a job aid instructing on how to use AR will be beneficial for you as well as the learners.

AR is becoming more mainstream, around us in our personal lives and, increasingly, in our places of business.

The enterprise sector has already made very real strides whilst other sectors play catch up.  In the past two years, enterprise AR has graduated from experimental tinkering to become a validated implementation that is very much now a permanent best practice for industrial operations.

In other words, if you are a leading corporation and you don’t already have AR looped into your business lines, congratulations, you are a dinosaur, particularly because it will be vital in leveraging the advantages of adjacent technologies like IoT. Last week, for instance, a report released by PTC and the Aberdeen Group stated that 67 percent of the enterprise AR users surveyed pair it specifically with IoT in order to conduct remote repairs.

Enterprise AR has gone mainstream

“This can come in both the form of task itemization as well as see-what-I-see remote expert guidance scenarios. Some technology elitist/purist might claim this isn’t “true” AR, but I think of it as existing on a spectrum; with this use case easier to deploy *and* capable of demonstrating value for a wide variety of organizations.” Nguyen said.

Take again the Capgemini “Augmented and Virtual Reality in Operations”report that I showcased in my article on enterprise VR, which details a number of use cases in which AR consistently drives higher productivity and efficiency levels by allowing companies to streamline workflows for a wide variety of manual tasks.

Boeing’s technicians use AR instructions for airplane wiring schematics in their field of view, allowing them to be hands-free, which reduces wiring production time by 25 percent and increases productivity by 40 percent.

Welsh Water uses an AR layer to present process-oriented information and instructions such as direction information for valves and switches, or ideal operating ranges for gauges and dials, which minimizes risk and informs the decision-making process.

Ford utilizes AR tech by allowing designers and engineers to dynamically peruse through digital designs and parts as if they were part of a physical vehicle, reducing the time to analyze designs to a matter of hours or minutes.

Siemens enables their employees to inspect circuit boards by augmenting their view and alerting them to various elements they could have missed, which has hiked quality up by 20 to 25 percent.

GE Transportation’s Global Services group leveraged AR to drastically increase the number of maintenance tasks per hour by 59 percent by allowing workers to view maintenance instructions and sign-off tasks when performing maintenance on locomotives.

Over the past year, two things have changed for the AR and VR market. First, developers in the market have started focusing on creating solutions that are targeted towards enterprises. Second, headset manufacturers have been creating lighter and cheaper products for large-scale use.

As a result, enterprise-wide applications have picked up significantly. Take Walmart for example. The company just decided to buy 17,000 VR headsets in order to make specialized training available to a million of its employees.

According to IDC, the combined Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) headset market grew 9.4 percent year over year in the third quarter of this year.

More specifically, the VR headsets market finally picked up after four consecutive quarters of decline and now makes up 97 percent of the combined market.

Global shipments for VR headsets reached 1.9 million units in the third quarter, up 8.2 percent from the third quarter last year, as extensive discounts on existing products and interest in new ones led to shipment gains in both the consumer and commercial markets.

“The VR market is finally starting to come into its own. On the consumer front, the combination of lower prices and increased content is beginning to resonate with users. Meanwhile, commercial adoption is also on the rise for a range of use cases, including training, design, and showcasing,” said IDC Senior Analyst Jitesh Ubrani.

During the quarter, screenless viewers such as Samsung’s Gear VR declined 58.6 percent as product discounts and availability have dried up.

Some of Samsung’s latest phones further exaggerate the issue as they are not compatible with the current version of the headset.

Besides Samsung, IDC sees other prominent brands such as Google and Alcatel also significantly scaling back their efforts in the AR/VR headsets space.

However, standalone headsets grew 428.6 percent and accounted for 20.6 percent of the VR headset market.

Facebook’s Oculus Go and Xiaomi’s Mi VR – the same headset, shipped into different markets by the two companies – together shipped nearly a quarter million headsets worldwide, making it the most popular standalone headset by a wide margin.

Tethered VR headsets surpassed 1 million units for the second time ever, making the third quarter of this year the best third quarter on record.

Sony shipped 463,000 PSVR headsets during the quarter followed by Oculus with 300,000 and HTC with 230,000.

However, Oculus managed to be the top vendor in the overall VR headset market thanks to the popularity of the Go as well as the Rift, capturing 25.9 percent of the entire VR market. Total Oculus shipments were 491,000 during the quarter, excluding the Xiaomi Mi VR.

IDC’s figures suggest that the AR headsets market also fared well during the quarter.

Lenovo captured the top spot with 23,000 headsets shipped. Most of that volume was comprised of the Star Wars Jedi Challenges headset, which is targeted at the consumer audience.

When excluding this headset, the AR headset market grew 1.1 percent over the previous year thanks to brands such as Vuzix and Epson.

Though Microsoft’s Hololens was still one of the most popular AR headsets, growth has slowed as many customers await the next generation headset that is expected to launch in 2019.

“With regards to AR, hardware growth remains modest, but we see strong interest in the technology from many companies. We expect new hardware shipping in 2019, from both established players and new ones, to help move the industry beyond proof of concepts and pilots into larger deployments,” said IDC Devices and Augmented and Virtual Reality Program Vice President Tom Mainelli.

What’s interesting to note, however, is the shift in the market with regards to AR and VR. Just a few years ago when the first headsets debuted in the market, it was imagined to bring a revolution to the gaming industry.

However, as time passes, it seems as though companies are seeing bigger opportunities in the enterprise market and creating products and solutions specifically for them.

Most recently, HTV Vive announced that it is launching a whole suite of “premium VR offerings for businesses of all sizes”. One of the tools they’ve launched is called the VIVE Sync — which claims to take virtual collaboration to the next level.

SACMI has decided to perform a global roll-out of XMReality Remote Guidance to its customers, thus strengthening its service offering and making it possible to generate new revenue streams. With the use of XMReality’s easy web client access they’ll be able to collaborate with a wider group of end users. SACMI will equip their help-desk staff with XMReality PointPads.

“Over recent years, SACMI has constantly invested resources to strengthen Customer Service and so help customers maximize the extraordinary performance provided by our machines”, explains Giuseppe Lesce, manager of the SACMI Customer Service Division. “From this viewpoint, XMReality is a further step in this direction. This augmented reality system’s combination of outstanding effectiveness and simplicity will, in fact, let us supply an advanced assistance service with ease, providing enormous added value for our customers worldwide”

“We are excited to help SACMI generate new revenue streams using XMReality Remote Guidance. The new web client has, since the October 2018 launch, enabled new ways of using XMReality Remote Guidance and SACMI is one of our first customers to take advantage of it.”, stated Johan Castevall, CEO of XMReality.

The order includes XMReality Remote Guidance software, XMReality PointPads, and XMReality Web client. The software value is approximately 0.4 MSEK annual recurring revenue and the roll-out will start in January 2019.

See more:

Full press release 

XMReality’s member profile

The State of Industrial Augmented Reality is an ongoing series of market research and analysis conducted by PTC. These reports explore the robust and increasingly complex opportunities presented by the Industrial Augmented Reality (AR) market. Tapping into PTC’s 30 years of technology expertise, 30,000 global customers, and 1,000 technology and service partners, the State of Industrial Augmented Reality series delivers actionable trends and insights across the entire IIoT ecosystem.

From the Executive Summary:

Over the life of our survey, use case adoption and customer business goals have shown that industrial enterprises are starting augmented reality projects internally, often piloting one or two use cases within their operations or service functions to prove value before expanding AR initiatives. Companies universally recognize the importance and benefits of adopting AR for their internal use. In today’s business climate of razor-thin operating margins and mounting economic pressures, the race for efficiency is starting to receive a nitrous boost from AR.

This mid-year spotlight edition of our State of Industrial Augmented Reality series examines development and adoption trends for companies primarily focused on developing augmented reality experiences for their end customers externally, by enhancing their customer-facing products, services, and solutions through the use of AR technology versus for their own internal use and benefit within their internal value chain.

PTC’s key findings include:

Industrial enterprises are keen to improve customer experiences, open up new revenue streams, and disrupt competition by leveraging the new augmented reality capabilities for product and service differentiation.

Use cases being developed for end customers have a strong focus on service or maintenance instructions, helping to reduce machine downtime and maximize product value.

Operator-focused companion experiences provide new opportunities for value-add offerings and improving customer service

Read the full report by PTC here.

Enterprise AR is a rich area of opportunity, given continually-proven bottom line impact. In fact, it’s the largest XR sub-sector in the outer years of ARtillry Intelligence’s latest revenue forecast. That’s mostly driven by demonstrable ROI in areas like industrial productivity and error reduction.

But despite that ROI story, there’s still lots of enterprise inertia and risk aversion, said Scope ARCEO Scott Montgomerie at AWE Europe (video below). We believe it will take a while to get over that hump, but then adoption will accelerate as we saw with enterprise smartphone adoption.

To accelerate that process, it’s all about case studies and proof points. It’s also about moving enterprises past “pilot purgatory” says Montgomerie. That happens when innovation centers in a given company adopt technology but other constituents, like I.T. dept. and employees, don’t.

But it still starts with the case studies. And those are slowly building throughout the enterprise AR sector. Scope AR has been an exemplar in pulling together ROI proof points, including increased output, better accuracy rate in diagnosing problems, and reducing time for task completion.

For example, Scope AR’s WorkLink software for pre-authored AR instructions reduced Lockheed Martin’s “orient & decide” portion of a satellite assembly by 99 percent. This type of work is where AR shines, as it reduces the cognitive load that’s inherent in translating 2D manuals to 3D space.

“To put into common terms, think about IKEA furniture,” said Montgomerie. “You have to look at those paper instructions, read weird diagrams, and do mental mapping of those diagrams… Multiply the complexity of that by a thousand and that’s the challenge we’re facing.”

Beyond pre-authored AR instructions, remote AR assistance (a.k.a “see what I see”) is proving valuable. Fast-food equipment supplier Prince Castle used Scope AR’s Remote AR to fix on-site equipment. It achieved 100 percent first time diagnosis rate and a 50 percent labor cost reduction.

“There’s about thirty things that can go wrong with these pieces of equipment,” said Montgomerie. “Figuring out which one of those things have gone wrong is really the key, and just with a phone call, their diagnosis rate was terrible — about 90 percent failure in first-time Diagnosis.”

As we’ve examined, Remote AR can also have macro-effects in an organization, such as reducing impact from subject-matter experts retiring. Shifting them from field work to remote AR assistance can delay retirement. It can also optimize diminishing volumes of experts through telepresence.

“In the next five years, they’re going to lose 330 years worth of experience just by having baby boomers retiring,” said Montgomerie. “These guys have spent 35 years learning exactly how to maintain, fix and operate equipment, and that knowledge is literally walking out the door.”

Unilever realized this advantage, as well as the unit economics of lessened downtime. Using Remote AR, it was able to reduce downtime by 50 percent for an ROI of 1,717 percent. The benefit is having things fixed faster when you don’t have to wait for a human to travel to the site.

But again, ROI proof points only get you so far. It’s also about setting the technology up to succeed by appealing to stakeholders throughout an organization — business leaders, I.T. depts. and employees, says Montgomerie. And that’s more about marketing than technology.

Business leaders are the easy part, and are usually sold on the merits of case studies like the above. Then comes I.T., whose job is to be risk-averse. Montgomerie’s advice: Get them involved as soon as possible. That may seem counterintuitive but it pays dividends downstream.

“I think it’s a common mistake — one we’ve certainly made — to do an end run around I.T.,” said Montgomerie. “It’s easy to say ‘yeah, let’s prove the value first and then we’ll worry about I.T. when we get to scale. I.T. will screw you at that point, so you need to get them in the conversation early.”

He also recommends deploying AR through smartphones and tablets when possible. The I.T. and data security pushback is lower with mobile devices, given their tenure and trustworthiness in the enterprise. Headsets like the Hololens conversely haven’t gained that level trust from I.T. yet.

As for employees, it’s likewise hard to win them over. But successful deployment requires their buy in. Resistance includes fear of new technology and job security. Montgomerie recommends educating them on how it benefits them, and enlist change-management pros.

“We’re talking about some pretty impressive ROI numbers here,” he said. “If I’m a worker I’m thinking, ‘oh well, the company can still do exactly the same on their bottom line with 50 percent of the workforce… does that mean I have a 1 in 2 chance of keeping my job next year’.”

In a broader sense, Montgomerie recommends deploying AR where it works best. It doesn’t work in rote and automated functions, where employees are already fine-tuned. It shines in low-volume, high complexity situations (like space shuttles), or high volume, small improvement scenarios.

Put another way, don’t be a hammer searching for nails. Act in a needs-driven way to deploy AR in targeted and optimized ways. Scope AR took this path with aerospace, engineering and heavy equipment, but Montgomerie believes there are many other verticals primed for AR.

“I think there’s an impression out there that AR is great for everything. I can tell you it’s not,” he said. “We’ve chosen key industries to go after… there are other industries where this is a greenfield — things like medical, construction, and logistics. There are some great use cases there.”

This follows an earlier mention on the FCC website, having been approved for communications use in the United States.

Seen by MySmartPrice, the new version of the AR device is said to be coming with longer battery life and improved performance – the Qualcomm processor replacing the Intel Atom used in the original is likely the reason for that. It is also claimed that the new model will have a higher resolution camera module.

The exterior is unlikely to change much, however. It will look similar to the existing Enterprise Edition used by workers in the US.

There is no word on a possible launch date, nor if it will be considered for consumer release. But we’ll keep you up to date as and when we hear more. Maybe there’s life in the old AR goggles yet.”