SATS, the chief ground-handling and in-flight catering service provider at Singapore Changi Airport, started piloting the Vuzix M300 Smart Glasses to digitize its ramp handling operations in mid-2017 and is now completing phase 2 by introducing and deploying the technology to more than 500 staff at Changi Airport. Using Vuzix M300 Smart Glasses, SATS ramp handling staff will now be able to scan barcodes on baggage and cargo containers to improve the baggage handling process.

Ramp handling staff will also receive real-time loading instructions, which provides the ramp control center with a real-time view of on-ground processes. SATS expects to increase accuracy and improve efficiency of baggage and cargo handling processes for larger wide-body aircraft, by reducing loading times by up to 15 minutes per flight on average.

SGX-listed SATS provides services in 60 airports and 62 cities across Asia and the Middle East.  You may like to watch the two related videos:

What are AR smart glasses doing on Changi airport tarmac? Video link

SATS ramp handling with Augmented Reality. Video link

The group, led by first author Dr. Fatih Incekara from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, converted MRI scans of brain tumor patients into holograms and then overlaid these holograms directly onto the head of each patient using a type of augmented reality technology known as mixed reality. This allowed clinicians to visualize the brain and tumor of each patient right before surgery.

“This new technology proved to be pretty accurate when compared with the neuronavigation system,” Incekara told AuntMinnieEurope.com. “And surgeons reported an improved focus during surgery.”

Tumor localization

In recent decades, image-guided navigation technologies have proved highly practical and effective for use in complex neurosurgeries such as brain tumor removal, the authors noted. Current neuronavigation methods using these tools, however, are impeded by long setup times and require clinicians to repeatedly shift their gaze back and forth between 2D images on a screen and the patient.

Seeking to find a more intuitive way to plan tumor surgery, Incekara and colleagues turned to mixed reality technology — a variation of augmented reality that allows users to see and interact with virtual objects and their actual surroundings. They tested the feasibility of this approach in presurgical planning for the removal of brain tumors from 25 patients at their institution.

The group began by acquiring and then segmenting brain MRI scans of the patients. Next, they reconstructed 3D virtual models of the brain tumors with open-source software (Meshmixer, Autodesk) and used 3D-modeling software (Verto Studio) to make these virtual models compatible for use in a mixed reality device (Hololens, Microsoft).

Wearing a HoloLens headset, the neurosurgeons were able to merge the hologram of the patient’s brain and tumor with the physical head of the patient. This enabled them to determine the location of tumors and then mark the center and border of each tumor directly on the patient’s head. For comparison, the surgical team marked the center and border of the tumors on the patient’s head again, but this time using the standard neuronavigation method. They eventually removed the brain tumors based on measurements from the standard method.

Overall, the holograms of the tumor aligned well with the borders of the actual tumor. The clinicians were able to locate tumors using the mixed reality technique as precisely as they did with the conventional neuronavigation method in nine of the 25 patients (36%). The median deviation between the two techniques was 0.4 cm for the rest of the cases.

Furthermore, the surgeons claimed that using the mixed reality device during the operation enhanced their ergonomics, their understanding of the relationship between the tumor and the brain, and their attention and focus on the patient.

The AR Management Platform is a new category of enterprise software aimed at meeting the biggest challenges facing business today, with the goal of empowering the 2.7 billion deskless workers that have been traditionally underserved by technology solutions. It is aimed squarely at helping enterprises tackle the velocity of business, product and technology change, the opportunities and challenges of advances in connectivity, the scarcity of resources and talent they face as well as the massive complexity of running large, at-scale operations.

Atheer says the key to meeting all of these challenges lies in technologies that empower frontline industrial workers with appropriate digital solutions. According to a recent study by Emergent Capital, the majority of the world’s workforce (in industries such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture) are the 2.7 billion “deskless” workers who have been “forgotten and overlooked by technology providers”.

In a new White Paper accompanying today’s announcement, Atheer underscores the vital role that an AR Management Platform can play in meeting the needs of these forgotten workers and how meeting their needs will provide the opportunity for a fundamental shift in the way industry works.

“Augmented Reality (AR) provides the answer to empowering that huge swath of the global workforce with a technology that will dramatically increase what they are able to accomplish at work – and improve the way they do so,” suggest the authors of the new White Paper (Bobby Yazdani, chairman of the board of Atheer, and Sanjog Gad, CEO of Atheer). “The new Augmented Reality Management Platform offers the promise of providing every member of the workforce with relevant, contextual, personalized information and guidance from across the enterprise into their field of view in a seamless, hands-free, intuitive manner that transforms the way they work.”

The AR Management Platform is also welcomed by industry analyst firm Aragon Research. “The Augmented Reality Management Platform, as pioneered by Atheer, marks an important milestone for Augmented Reality in the enterprise,” said Jim Lundy, Founder and CEO at Aragon Research.  “Aragon believes that the advent of the Augmented Reality Management Platform (ARMP) will truly transform how enterprises – and the supply chains that work with them – run their business and support their workforces.”

Atheer CEO Sanjog Gad explained that this new platform definition is fundamental to the future development of Atheer. “The AR Management Platform is our guiding star,” he said. “We believe it offers so much promise and will be so vital to empowering the vast majority of the world’s industrial enterprises that we are making major investments in every part of our company to realize the full potential of this new software category. We can deliver many elements of that vision today and, with our own ongoing close collaboration with partners and customers, have dedicated ourselves to realizing its full potential.”

There are eight pillars to an AR Management Platform. It is device-agnostic, supports natural interactions, offers real-time ‘see what I see’ video, audio and text-based collaboration, digital asset management, offers contextual awareness, a predictive experience, performance analytics and is enterprise-ready.

Read the full press release to find out how Atheer sees the full 8 pillars being implemented.

With the new technology, Colgate-Palmolive employees will be able to troubleshoot machinery while keeping their hands free to work and use their voice to engage with company subject matter experts (SMEs), equipment suppliers and manufacturing teams across sites for support and cross training.  In addition, Colgate-Palmolive plans to use the devices to retrieve and capture documents and video.

“Colgate-Palmolive tested RealWear HMT-1 through successful pilots in 8 locations and is now standardizing globally on this wearable device for our manufacturing operations,” said Warren Pruitt, VP Global Engineering at Colgate-Palmolive.  “Looking ahead, we see an opportunity to use this tool beyond the plant floor for improved performance and new efficiencies.”

“Colgate-Palmolive’s global deployment signifies that industrial wearable computing has crossed the chasm into mainstream manufacturing companies,” said Andy Lowery, RealWear CEO and cofounder. “This has been a textbook example of how to move with energy and purpose, from evaluation through pilot to global deployment.”

The commercial deployment will include Librestream Onsight Connect for remote mentoring and RealWear Foresight cloud platform for app deployment.

With remote teams becoming more common, being able to bring the team together into a shared space is key to ensuring effective communication and projects stay on track.

All platforms allow a user access to VOIP, movement around the scene, object interaction, recording and playback of action, changing of environmental conditions and the recording of task oriented metrics.

The VISIONxR framework can be used across many markets including enterprise, AEC, education, training, retail, gaming and entertainment.

Upskill has been developing Skylight as an operating platform to work across all devices, regardless of the manufacturer, but company co-founder and CEO Brian Ballard sees something special with HoloLens. “What HoloLens does for certain types of experiences, is it actually opens up a lot more real estate to display information in a way that users can take advantage of,” Ballard explained.

He believes the Microsoft device fits well within the broader approach his company has been taking over the last several years to support the range of hardware on the market while developing solutions for hands-free and connected workforce concepts.

“This is about extending Skylight into the spatial computing environment making sure that the workflows, the collaboration, the connectivity is seamless across all of these different devices,” he told TechCrunch.

Microsoft itself just announced some new HoloLens use cases for its Dynamics 365 platform around remote assistance and 3D layout, use cases which play to the HoloLens strengths, but Ballard says his company is a partner with Microsoft, offering an enhanced, full-stack solution on top of what Microsoft is giving customers out of the box.

That is certainly something Microsoft’s Terry Farrell, director of product marketing for mixed reality at Microsoft recognizes and acknowledges. “As adoption of Microsoft HoloLens continues to rapidly increase in industrial settings, Skylight offers a software platform that is flexible and can scale to meet any number of applications well suited for mixed reality experiences,” he said in a statement.

That involves features like spatial content placement, which allows employees to work with digital content in HoloLens, while keeping their hands free to work in the real world. They enhance this with the ability to see multiple reference materials across multiple windows at the same time, something we are used to doing with a desktop computer, but not with a device on our faces like HoloLens. Finally, workers can use hand gestures and simple gazes to navigate in virtual space, directing applications or moving windows, as we are used to doing with keyboard or mouse.

Sanjog Gad joins Atheer to manage its hypergrowth , as the company gains significant traction with enterprise customers, doubles the size of its team, deepens its senior leadership bench, moves into new, larger offices in Santa Clara, California and expands into new markets in Europe, Latin America and South America.

Sanjog said he is excited by the huge opportunity Atheer has, to augment and transform enterprise business processes by leveraging industry’s first Augmented Reality Management Platform (ARMP), which was announced today. “Atheer is in a unique position, as no vendor has taken a step back and provided a blueprint to properly realize the promise of enterprise AR – and that’s what we are doing,” he added.

As Senior Vice President at enterprise software giant SAP, Sanjog was responsible for first ever cloud native Platform as a Service on Amazon Web Services – and all SaaS applications built on that platform.

Prior to SAP, he held senior positions at EMC, Microsoft, WebEx (where he was one of the early team members and responsible for leading development of the highly scalable and fault tolerant WebEx backbone) and Baan (where he was a founding member of the core engineering team). With this experience, Sanjog brings the insights and experience he has gained from working at the forefront of enabling a business-critical, cloud-based platform for enterprise customers. Sanjog also has successful start-up experience gained at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) and Fishbowl Marketing Analytics (acquired by a private equity firm).

“With his deep industry experience, keen understanding of the needs of the enterprise market and proven track record of leadership, Sanjog Gad is the right person to guide Atheer through its next stage of development and growth,” said Bobby Yadzani, chairman of the board of Atheer. “Sanjog pioneered the market for cloud enterprise applications during his time at SAP and drove the growth of development of enterprise collaboration company at WebEx., We are delighted to welcome him to Atheer.”

Burström acknowledged the recent progression of surgical techniques, “Today we see a number of trends in spine surgery; image guided surgery and navigation is widely used and widely studied, and [alongside] those, 3D imaging in the operating room is on the rise.”

He noted that the literature depicts a wide variation of accuracies reported for pedicle screw placement. For example, in meta-analyses, many studies report superiority for navigation compared to free-hand. However, this finding was not reported by all studies and cannot be extended to all indications.

Exozet’s team of digital transformation experts work with some of Germany’s most well-known brands to re-define their training and customer engagement experiences. Powered by VE Studio, they will be able to create and manage immersive 3D virtual and augmented experiences faster, on more xR devices, and more economically than with a traditional hand-coding process.

Over the past 15 years DiSTI has been a leader in developing virtual training solutions for the US market and is now expanding into global regions where there is a need for virtual and augmented reality enterprise solutions. The German market is an area of high demand given the presence of global manufacturing companies who are requesting innovative new training solutions based on virtual and augmented reality technologies in order to improve training for internal staff and customers on new products delivered around the world.

For Exozet, this partnership aligns with their ambitions to expand their capabilities to develop virtual and augmented reality training solutions for enterprise customers in Germany and the region. VE Studio will enable Exozet to address their customers’ demands in an even more efficient and agile manner by leveraging its patented data-driven approach to content development and management.

Commenting on this partnership agreement, Frank Zahn, Exozet CEO, states: “There is a growing demand in Germany for virtual and augmented reality solutions which improve employee performance and enable companies to leverage the technology to improve global operations. VE Studio provides us with a proven and very efficient platform with which we can reduce the development time and cost, and allow us to support our customers more efficiently.”

The partnership will enable both companies to scale their business in the German-speaking region where the demand for virtual and augmented reality solutions is accelerating. As part of the partnership with DiSTI, Exozet will establish a Virtual and Augmented Reality Innovation and Development Center at their headquarters in Berlin where they can demonstrate existing production use cases and work together with customers to develop their virtual reality training solutions.

The press release in German on Exozet’s website can be found here.

Full press release in English.

Presented on 24 September in Berlin, the purpose of the Pharma 4.0 Award recognises outstanding implementation in manufacturing execution systems innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.

Vifor Pharma was the first company to pilot a dynamic team-based augmented reality system (Goodly Innovations’ OptiworX) in a pilot project at its site in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 2017. Augmented reality uses optical devices to create a “mixed reality” (i.e. real and virtual) 3D holographic information, like superimposed text and graphics over the real environment.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging processes are complex. Floor operators must run through many detailed checklists of changeover or line clearance tasks while ensuring that no errors occur. These processes, often managed using printed manuals and checklists, are slow and prone to errors.

Augmented reality turns any task list – no matter how complex – into a dynamic multi user workflow that adapts continuously to real-life operations as each task is completed, such as when the number of operators changes. The application also gives users only the instructions they need at each step in the process. Operators are thus able to do their jobs better and faster, and with much more flexibility and accuracy, even when processes become more complex.

“Applying augmented reality in our operations allowed us to improve the changeover process and increase productivity by up to 50% at our packaging plant,” said Dr. Benno Bischof, Head of Product Group, Technical Operations, in St. Gallen. “We have clearly demonstrated the potential of augmented reality by using it to create a dynamic teamwork system, unprecedented in our industry. -. This is the kind of innovative technology that we strive to use to improve our operations.”