The Economist recently featured a round up of different Augmented Reality use cases about smart glasses and wearables in the workplace entitled “Here’s looking at you.” This summary includes four AREA members: Newport News Shipbuilding, Atheer, JoinPad and DAQRI.

The article states that while consumers may not be ready for odd-looking wearables, the workplace is already embracing them.

Schneider Electric is featured because their workers can spend up to half their work time searching for technical data in software, databases, activity logs and through paper records. Schneider Electric is testing Augmented Reality systems that make that same information appear via wearables in a fraction of the time: research suggests time taken for search is reduced to a tenth, meaning immense productivity and efficiency savings.

The article further describes enterprise examples from the following providers and enterprise applications, and includes a number of AREA members:

• Siemens, a German engineering company, is using technology by AREA member JoinPad to help with various tasks such as the prevention of hazardous and costly oil fires in high-voltage transformers, where they have typically experienced 20% productivity gains.
• Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, where 200 workers currently use Augmented Reality on tablets, is rolling out AR during construction of an aircraft carrier and half-a-dozen submarines for the US Navy. They plan to use smart helmets in the future.
• Atheer, another AREA member, is distributing Air Smart Glasses to industrial users within a few months with headset prices “getting keener.”
• The DAQRI Smart Helmet is being used at KSP Steel in Kazakhstan.

Member profiles can be read here.

Other providers mentioned in the article include Hololens, Vuzix and Augmedix.

A summary article by Tx Zhuo, Managing Partner at Karlin Ventures, published on Entrepreneur.com starts with citing Google Glass’ decision to focus on its Project Aura headset as an indication that the future of Augmented Reality is moving away from consumers and headed towards using AR as an enterprise solution.

It goes on to show how companies are already leveraging existing hardware like iPads and smartphones whereas others are developing innovative new products.
The article warns that while some consumers may think Augmented Reality is a gimmick, the workplace is already being revolutionized by AR technology, with processes being streamlined and improvements in safety and communication.

Vendor mentions in the article go to member DAQRI’s smart helmet, which delivers instructions and safety guidelines pertaining to the users’ surroundings, as well as to member Scope AR’s ability to deliver 3D instructions to field technicians. GetVu also received a mention for using wearables to increase efficiency and reduce warehouse packing errors, as does IBM’s Max Reality.

The article also offers advice for AR startups by presenting a four-step process to market positioning, including surveying stakeholders, considering hardware, targeting “motivated trailblazers” and thinking about the most valuable and contextual data inputs. Finally a word to enterprises considering investment in Augmented Reality: focus on ROI.

A press release by International Data Corporation (IDC) on May 19 announced the 2016 IDC Innovators: pioneers in the smart eyewear enterprise market. The criteria IDC employed were that companies must have under $50m revenue and must offer inventive technology and/or a ground-breaking business model.

We would like to congratulate AREA members APX Labs, Atheer and Vital Enterprises in being named IDC Innovators. All the awarded companies are said to be addressing the challenges of providing a robust, integrated, scalable and flexible enterprise platform for smart eyewear.

APX Lab’s Skylight software helps enterprises create a connected workplace through smart glasses by giving hands-free access to critical applications and information within workers’ field of view, without disrupting the flow of work. Skylight can integrate with existing and custom enterprise systems including those from Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com and others. Read APX Labs member profile here.

The Atheer AiR (Augmented Interactive Reality) platform consists of the AiR Smart Glasses, the Android-based AiR OS and the AiR Suite for Enterprise. The AiR glasses are designed to enhance the productivity and safety of deskless professionals. Atheer member profile can be read here.

Vital Enterprise’s platform connects remote workers and experts by providing remote assistance and telestration, and hands-free interaction with the data-display and communication capabilities of smart glasses. Vital’s enterprise software platform integrates with best-in-class glasses from ODG, Google and others.

Other innovators included Pristine’s EyeSight, whose platform enables real time connections between workers and managers via smart glasses, and XOEye Technologies, which equips facilities and field technicians with wearable technology systems that capture & share information. Well done to all!

AREA member Catchoom is a Barcelona-based computer vision technology service provider and developer of visual search enabling technologies which sends its team to Mobile World Congress each year. In this post on the Catchoom blog, the marketing team describes the situation at MWC 2016 very succinctly: it was more like a ‘Virtual Reality World Congress.’  The first highlight of the post is the photo of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg casually strolling amid hundreds of journalists wearing Samsung VR headsets during the Samsung preview evening event. This really set the stage for what blossomed into a global discussion about potential risks of VR turning people into tethered, captive puppets.

The post then provides insights about the vendors which were showing AR and making announcements in conjunction with the event. The most notable Augmented Reality announcement covered in the Catchoom blog was the Epson Moverio BT-300 introduction. Other highlights included the Fujitsu helmet for industrial workers.

AREA member Atheer announced in a press release that its AiR Suite for Enterprise software for smart glasses is available for developers choosing to implement use cases with Recon Instruments’ Jet. Running on Recon Jet, a water-resistant and impact-resistant smart glasses device originally designed for use in sports use cases, the AiR Suite software can provide enterprise professionals with hands-free capabilities including remote collaboration for rapid problem solving. This development follows a prior announcement that it has optimized and released the AiR Suite for Enterprise for use with Vuzix M-100 smart glasses.

Through these new relationships and its support for third-party hardware, Atheer is paving the way for enterprises to deploy and manage Augmented Reality-enabled systems through its own binocular hardware devices as well as complementary solutions.

By offering a single enterprise-ready smart glasses information delivery and management software architecture, Atheer integration partners should be able to more easily approach enterprises with diverse use cases for the technology.

During a fireside chat conducted at the Web Summit in December, Paul Davies of Boeing and Matt Kammerait of DAQRI summarized the history of AR and explained why it is important for, and provides new value to their companies. The conversation then turned to the future. Davies and Kammerait discussed the many opportunities and challenges ahead for enterprise Augmented Reality. Davies summarized the use cases found in manufacturing aircraft and other Boeing products. He also explained his vision for work instruction delivery in the future: a seamless digital thread that is parallel to the real world that is totally integrated. In the future, Davies suggested, Augmented Reality will be fully integrated into industrial design and production systems. It will always be available when and as needed.

Matt Kammerait described the origins of his company and the challenges encountered, which led to the design and development of the Smart Helmet. He closed by describing the future to which DAQRI products are designed to contribute: a time when any worker will be able to perform any task on any project at any time in any company.

In a press release issued by Technavio, the company announced that it has identified seven top contributors to the overall revenue generated from sales of mobile Augmented Reality software and services. Two of these, DAQRI and Catchoom, are AREA members.

The quote in the release states that the company’s human interface research analyst, Sunil Kumar, found Augmented Reality to be beneficial in providing information about a product or service in use cases that involved consumers. The revenues generated by AR suppliers are compared to the total mobile advertising revenues.

The seven companies selected are quite similar to those profiled in the recent Gartner Group industry update, including:
– Augmented Pixels
– Aurasma
– Blippar
– Catchoom
– DAQRI
– Metaio
– Wikitude

Unfortunately, the company’s analysts do not shed any additional light on whether they studied or sized revenues generated from enterprise use cases.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies CEO Dirk Ahlborn described his plans for the future of transportation including, but not limited to, Augmented Reality-assisted windows for passengers. Ahlborn suggested in the TechCrunch interview that the passenger’s experience would permit immersive as well as shared experiences, rather than the isolating ones involving Virtual Reality as proposed for airplanes.

The project mentioned is currently being studied as part of a partnership with RE’FLEKT, a German company in which Bosch has recently invested. RE’FLEKT and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies presented the concept using an Augmented Reality Wall during the Natrans-Arabia 2015 Trade Fair in Abu Dhabi. The interactive display shown in Abu Dhabi illustrates how Augmented Reality can also be integrated into the transportation system’s information management services for use by professionals building or servicing the future system’s components, or to educate investors, partners or passengers.

Maybe there should be a site that maintains a list of jobs which will be changed by availability of Augmented Realty-assisted systems. In this post on the BBC Future blog, Rose Eveleth compiles a few use cases for enterprise Augmented Reality that range from tasks routinely performed in a dentist’s office to those performed on oil sand pipelines and in Lockheed Martin’s fighter jet assembly plants.

Some of the systems described, for example, the use of AR on tablets for installing a clamp onto a pipe without any prior experience, and smart glasses for dentists to use x-rays when examining patients being designed by EyeCAD Connect. Such systems are already available for commercial use.

The post is helpful for those who are unfamiliar with Augmented Reality because it describes use cases, as well as a few of the common obstacles, in a realistic manner. For example, the author points out that use case selection is critical to the success of enterprise AR. Deciding exactly which tasks could benefit from Augmented Reality is not as easy as it might sound. Many tasks are easily performed without technology assistance.

The other obstacle that is raised through an interview with Gabe Batstone, CEO of AREA member Contextere (formerly CEO of NGRAIN, also an AREA member), is the human resistance to change. When it is not clear if the use case can benefit from adding Augmented Reality, it’s difficult to persuade anyone that they need it. On the other hand, when the use case involves highly complex or unique information, such as the x-rays of a patient, the human obstacles are significantly lower.

Perhaps, when enterprise Augmented Realty will be more mature, it will be easier to publish a post listing the jobs that are not changed by Augmented Reality than a list of those the technology has changed.

Building job sites can be very dangerous. Projects or products that lower risk to workers get the attention of managers. When those who offer Augmented Reality solutions can reliably demonstrate that the technology raises awareness of those on a job site to potential risk so that danger can be reduced, AR will be taken more seriously. Creating solutions that reduce more risk than they introduce is not easy.

Collaboration will go further and produce customer-ready products than direct competition among vendors that only master some of the components of the final system.

Partnerships of the type described in the announcement issued by Topcon Positioning Group bring expertise in different domains to bear on the common challenges. In this partnership DAQRI is bringing its helmet technology and 4D Studio to bear on the presentation of informational messages. The systems the two companies plan to offer to AEC industry customers will leverage Topcon’s deep understanding of its industries (including construction, agriculture, forestry, mining and utilities) and effectiveness of GPS products and services.

More partnerships of this nature, between technology providers and solution providers in AEC or in other industries, could be very valuable to accelerating enterprise AR adoption.