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.”

Production levels of the Vuzix Blade AR Smart Glasses continue to ramp with steadily improving yields; with management’s production target capacity of 2000 units per month expected to be achieved by the end of Q1.  As part of Vuzix’ expanding waveguide production capabilities, the Company will phase in additional production capacity during 2019 for OEM-related smart glasses and waveguide projects commensurate with increased unit demand from expected project customers.

“The Vuzix Blade received a great reception at CES 2019 with thousands of booth visitors that ranged from the C-Suite of major consumer brands and corporations to strategic partners from around the world,” said Paul Travers, President and CEO of Vuzix.

“The assortment of hands-on Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses demonstrations at CES 2019, including the ‘Day in the Life with Vuzix Blade’, provided an opportunity for attendees to understand how Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses can deliver content, alerts and information to consumers without taking their phones out of their pockets.

As a direct result of these CES demonstrations, some of the largest wireless carriers in the world across North America, Europe and Asiahave shown strong interest in deploying our waveguide and smart glass technologies and products for their wireless networks in the near future and see its ability to drive cellular services, including 5G, and provide a competitive advantage.”

Those predictions in 2018 were the following:

1. Lower prices for AR hardware
2. Insights from data will be vital
3. AI and machine learning make AR better
4. Hardware becomes more powerful
5. Form factors will evolve

Part 2 – predictions for 2019

Full original article with 2019 predictions can be read here.  Part two of the two part series covers 5 new predictions on Augmented Reality in the coming year. Atheer also checks in with what analysts in the technology community are predicting as well.

1. There will be more change on the hardware front
2. Mobile first but not mobile only
3. Enterprise AR customers will go public
4. Data from AR projects will become even more important
5. AR in government

The concluding part of the article includes research from Garter, ABI Research and The IDC.

From an AREA viewpoint, we are hugely interested in prediction 3, enterprise AR customers will go public. Here are Atheer’s thoughts on the topic:

“This one is interesting. Over the last year, we have seen how many traditional industrial enterprise customers have wanted to stay in “stealth mode” about their work in piloting and experimenting with augmented reality solutions. The result has been that you see relatively few stories about named companies using AR to change the way they work.

The reasons these companies typically didn’t want to go public about their AR work was simple: they wanted to make sure that it worked and get internal buy-in before declaring to the world that they were committed to AR. In many cases, they also wanted to ensure that they didn’t give a heads-up to their competitors about the pioneering work they were doing.

We predict that in 2019, that will be flipped on its head. Companies will go from being shy about talking publicly about their AR work to wanting to shout it from the rooftops as their customers and investors become more and more aware of how AR has the potential to make a big difference in their business.

They will do so because those same customers and investors will demand it. Customers will want to know why they can’t benefit from the use of AR to meet their needs and investors will want to know why the company they are investing in doesn’t seem to have the same kind of commitment as the company’s competitors. And executives in the “C-suite” will also begin asking their teams “what are we doing in AR and when will it be ready to use”.

In this eBook, Augmented Reality for the Transportation and Logistics Industry, you’ll learn how to:

• Address the challenges facing the Transportation and Logistics industry
• Apply Augmented Reality to super charge your digitization efforts
• Transform the productivity, accuracy, and safety of your workforce
• Assess your needs and how to identify the usecases best suited to this transformation.

“Accurately calculating downtime should be a part of how you plan for Augmented Reality – and think about the return on an AR investment. It’s where AR can really make a huge, measurable, and repeatable difference to your bottom line.”

Read: Atheer’s AREA member profile

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.

Of the coming year, Mark Sage, Executive Director said:

“As we head into 2019 and we look forward to continued growth in the ecosystem. More enterprises are researching, developing pilots and /or moving towards commercialising AR technology and gaining great ROI.  Thank you to all our members, partners and associates for being a part of this exciting journey and development during 2018.  I look forward to working with you to see what the new year will bring for AR in the enterprise.”

We would like to wish all our followers, readers, associates, colleagues, staff, leaders and members a very Happy New Year.

In the section on augmented reality, it is stated:

“When it comes to augmented reality, we often think of Pokémon Go and other such games.

However, the technology has grown far beyond the gaming and entertainment sectors.

In this article, we look at popular use cases of augmented reality in the business world.

Manufacturing, education, health care, marketing, fashion, travel, navigation, retail, food and beverage, and enterprise — these are all industries using AR.”

The article links to use cases of AR in the enterprise.

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

A demonstration of the integration of AccuWeather’s weather data in the Vuzix Blade®  Smart Glasses will debut in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

AccuWeather, the largest and fastest-growing weather media company and global leader in weather-related big data, business and analytics, provides localized weather forecasts to more than 1.5 billion people worldwide.  Now, for the first-time, individuals will be able to interact and view localized weather content and weather forecasts through Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses.   Planning for the weather is critically important at home or travelling to other cities or destinations.  Vuzix users now will have the added convenience of leaving their phones in their pockets while wearing the Vuzix Blade to stay informed and updated regarding the weather without missing a beat.

Read more in the full press release.

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.