A recent article summarises a new report by Gene Munster, of Loop Ventures, which ranks how some of the major tech players fare in Augmented Reality race.

Google parent Alphabet was an early player in the space, with its Glass and Tango products from several years ago. Munster says that while it might be easy to write off Glass, he calls it a “before-its-time experiment,” while Tango “looks like a for-its-time experiment.” Levono’s Phab 2 Pro is already Tango-enhanced and and Acer plans to make a Tango-ready phone. These devices will use rear-facing cameras to enable the AR experience.

Apple has also been moving into the space, as CEO Tim Cook has said repeatedly in recent months. Munster speculates that the next iPhone could be the first AR hardware with mass adoption if it integrates a dedicated 3D mapping chip as expected.

Munster writes that Microsoft “may be the furthest along in AR today” thanks to its Hololens and Windows Holographic OS. He writes that Microsoft will be determined not to miss out on the AR market with its competency being in productivity, an area that’s not necessary to win the AR OS battle.

Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Augmented Reality product hard. Facebook is experimenting with both VR and AR.

Munster doesn’t expect Amazon to try to enter the AR wearables space, but he does think they’re a player through Alexa, and these devices will eventually come with cameras that will further this capability.

Snap has an advantage because communication is a “key use” for AR, according to Munster, so its focus on the camera as a communication tool is an advantage. He expects them to focus more on communication in AR, making them an intermediary between developers and the larger OS players.

Maybe our conclusion is disheartening: in the foreseeable future, some combination of Google, Apple, and Microsoft is likely to win the AR OS race. While not exciting, it’s logical. Apple and Google, prior OS winners, won the mobile layer. Part of the reason is that these shifts are well defined and the existing players are carefully positioning themselves to be sure that they have a seat at the table. The good news is that the future won’t always be owned by the incumbents. As we move away from purely digital technologies into ones that combine the sciences — biology, chemistry, psychology – the opportunities for new major players will emerge.

In a recent article, the Mineral Exploration industry is said to be moving towards the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality.

The article states that in 2015, Integra Gold open-sourced the data on its Lamaque project in Val-d’Or, Que. The project has nearly 900,000 ounces of high-grade gold indicated and another 1 million ounces inferred.  As payoff for opening up its data, Integra got an artificially intelligent virtual reality model of its resources. As more data is collected and plowed into the model, the database learns from itself and creates increasingly accurate new models of the underground gold deposits.

George Salamis Chairman of Integra Gold has said that this technology is a much-needed digital revolution in mining since he felt that the mineral exploration industry is not normally known for its digital innovation.

He also commented: “The oil and gas industry is already about a decade ahead of mineral exploration… by creating $1-million contest that sought the best proposal for how to use data it put a call out not just to geoscientists but to tech developers, game designers and even medical researchers.”

In this year’s conference of Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, which was held in Toronto this week, Quebec-based SGS Geostat took first place winning a $500,000 top prize with a program combining artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics and Virtual Reality which will map the Lamaque resources below ground in an interactive 3D space. The article says that this map will help the company go after high value drilling targets on the Val-d’Or property more accurately than traditional methods.

According to the article the exponential growth of computing power means that mines could now stick sensors on pretty much everything from haul trucks to worker uniforms, tracking the data centrally and then open-sourcing it to let the tech world help find efficiency improvements and solve problems.

News was announced this week by Caterpillar Inc about the availability of their CAT LIVESHARE software platform, delivered in conjunction with AREA member Scope AR.  This software delivers the industry’s first Augmented Reality-based live video calling platform for members of the Cat dealer network to conduct real-time remote support, training and equipment maintenance.

According to the article hundreds of users across six Cat dealers have already starting using the software worldwide in the United States, South Africa, Australia, Denmark and Canada.

Scott Montgomerie, CEO and co-founder of Scope AR has said, “we are thrilled by the immediate response to and adoption of CAT LIVESHARE. When downtime of complex equipment can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue and days of lost productivity on a job site, it’s imperative that expert knowledge can be shared with remote workers in real-time to help with repairing, troubleshooting a problem or conducting maintenance on equipment. Through the use of CAT LIVESHARE, companies can now ensure workers complete a procedure accurately every time, while also documenting the process for accountability, performance assessment and knowledge retention.” 

CAT LIVESHARE is based upon Scope AR’s Remote AR technology. The platform delivers an ‘unprecedented’ ability to save time and money by combining Augmented Reality with live video streaming, voice, 3D animation, annotation, screen sharing and white-boarding to simulate the effectiveness of having the expert looking over your shoulder guiding you on what to do step-by-step.

Caterpillar have over 160 dealers and millions of pieces of Cat equipment in use worldwide. This new platform, CAT LIVESHARE, is gaining significant adoption, with several operators and dealers having already recognized the potential for efficiency and cost gains.

With over 90 people and 45 companies present, the first day of the first Augmented Reality Requirements workshop was an amazing success!  The workshop was hosted at the DMDII/UI Labs in Chicago.

Mark Sage, Executive Director of the AREA, shares his views on day 1 of the AR Workshop: Hardware / Software Functional Requirements for Industrial Applications.

Day 1 started with an introduction from Tom McDermott (DMDII) Mark Sage and then focused on hardware requirements. The session was expertly managed by Lonny Johnson, who stepped through the benchmark requirements defined by Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar and Proctor and Gamble.

For every requirement presented, there were lots of useful and interesting comments from the audience. The engagement was amazing and there was a real buzz in the room.

The day finished with a networking session and demo event with many of the AREA members showing their solutions. Everyone commented on how successful and interesting the day had been and that it was the first-time people the industry have come together to discuss Global Enterprise Requirements.

Day 2 will focus on software and finishes with an open session hosted by the AREA to discuss next steps and how to continue developing these global AR Enterprise requirements.

An article released by Cio talks about Augmented Reality being the next frontier for competitive advantage. There is an inflection point where IoT, Cloud and AI started to converge together to lay the foundation for new set of business applications. They believe that one of the most interesting developments where this convergence comes together is the field of Augmented Reality.

The article suggests that AR is the blending of VR and real life; AR applications have virtual images that blend in with contents in the real world.  With AR, users are able to interact with virtual contents in the real world, and are able to distinguish between the two worlds within the same experience.  AR may have far greater applicability as it links the digital and analog worlds.

The article states that smart factories driven with Industrial IoT advancements also provide specific use cases where AR can add to competitive advantage of an enterprise. An AR enabled solution can enable monitoring of plant assets from a virtual control room with real-time sensor data that monitors heat, pressure, scrap and other key characteristics.  The IoT data can be visually overlaid with machine data such as schematic drawings, service steps and increase the efficiency and productivity of industrial facilities by enabling maintenance personnel to see the most pertinent sensor data in an AR view.

They believe that AR applications in the medical field can be significant and can change the way medical professionals interact with each other during a diagnosis or a surgery. A remote team of surgeons can get the first-hand view of an ongoing surgery with all vital stats overlaid along with medical records such as MRI on a head up display. The AR technology will also be of interest to architects and smart city planners who could create virtual 3-D walkthroughs from existing 2-D blueprints overlaid with construction equipment, people, interior decoration and other geolocation data.

They believe that the most important step in getting your enterprise AR initiatives off the ground is to evaluate and select an AR framework and have said “There are quite a few open source & commercial platforms that provide rich SDK. The purpose behind selecting a platform is that you can focus on the features of your applications and the platform provides the capabilities like 3D object tracking, face tracking, visual search, camera calibration, content APIs and support for various marker types (e.g. square, QR code). The platform needs to have support to recognize image targets through a cloud datastore as well as local image store. This improves application usability as it can work both in connected and offline mode.Eventually AR is an interface paradigm shift that would completely rewrite how we would interact with everything.”

A report by Cognizant says that technology is boosting learning and development (L&D) in the workplace. The report discusses innovation being constant in the information technology industry as it is continuously changing the way services are delivered to the business and to end users.

The report states “From the mainframe era on to the Internet stage, we’re now experiencing the fifth IT wave, an era in which social, mobile, analytics and cloud [aka the SMAC Stack] are forming a new digital foundation with which to power business. SMAC is already changing how IT is being deployed across industries, and as business becomes increasingly digital this new stack is expected to have a multiplying effect on operational efficiency and productivity.”

According to the report exponential growth in computer processing power and the steady increase in the number of computing devices and users is another constant throughout technologies swift progression with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality based hardware devices being part of this growing computing base too.

The report says “They leverage advancements in mobile technology and big data analytics to offer new communications channels for enterprise applications. Augmented and virtual reality is converging with SMAC and, as a result, businesses across multiple sectors are now able to tap their vast potential to help users visualize data and instructions that overlay physical assets in real time.”

Many companies are increasingly applying AR tools to create effective training programs that drive employee engagement and success in the highly competitive global marketplace and the report explains “This technology – augmented reality [AR] – is being deployed to more effectively mobilize workers across multiple industries,”

According to Gartner research, AR is poised to become an important workplace tool. AR technology has matured to a point where organizations can use it as an internal tool to complement and enhance key business processes, workflows and employee training. Visualization of content is among the many important business innovations that AR can facilitate.

AREA: Tell us about VanGogh Imaging and how the company started.

KEN LEE: The reason I started VanGogh was I noticed an opportunity in the market. From 2005 to 2008, I worked in medical imaging where we mainly used 3D models and would rarely go back to 2D images. 3D gives you so much more information and a much better visual experience than flat 2D images. But creating 3D content was a very difficult and lengthy process. This is the one huge problem that we are solving at VanGogh Imaging.

We started when Microsoft Kinect first introduced their low-cost 3D sensoring technology. It allowed you to map in a three-dimensional way, where you can see objects and scenes and capture and track them. Van Gogh started in this field around 2011 and we’ve been steadily improving our 3D capture technology for over five years, working with several clients and differentiating ourselves by delivering the highest quality and easiest way to capture 3D models.

AREA: What is Dynamic SLAM and how does it differ from standard SLAM?

KEN LEE: Standard SLAM has been around for years. It works well when the environment is fairly static – no movements, a steady environment, no lighting changes. Dynamic SLAM is a SLAM that can adjust to these factors, from moving objects and changing scenes to people walking in front and lots of occlusions.

AREA: Are there certain use cases or applications that are particularly suited to dynamic SLAM?

KEN LEE: Dynamic SLAM is perfect for the real world, real-time environment. In our case, we are using dynamic capture mostly to enhance the 3D capture capability – so making 3D capture much easier, but still capturing at a 3D photorealistic level and fully automating the entire capture process plus dealing with any changes.

Let’s say you’re capturing a changing scene. You can update the 3D models in real time, just as you would capture 2D images with a video camera. We can do the same thing, but every output will be an updated 3D model at that given point. That’s why Dynamic SLAM is great. You can use dynamic SLAM just for tracking – for AR and VR – but that’s just one aspect. Our focus is on having the best tracking, not just for tracking purposes, but really to use that tracking capability to capture models very easily and update them in real time.

AREA: Once you have that model, can you use it for any number of different processes and applications?

KEN LEE: Sure. For example, you can do something as basic as creating 3D content to show people remotely. Let’s say I have a product on my desk and I want to show it to you. I can take a picture of it, or in less than a minute, I can scan that product, email it, and you immediately get a 3D model. Microsoft is updating its PowerPoint software next year so you will be able to embed 3D models.

There are other applications. You can use the 3D model for 3D printing. You can also use it for AR and VR, enabling users to visualize objects as true 3D models. One of the biggest challenges in both the VR and AR industry is content generation. It is very difficult to generate true 3D content in a fully automated process, on a real-time basis, that enables you to interact with other people using that same 3D model! That’s the massive problem we’re solving. We’re constantly working on scene capture, which we want to showcase this year, using the same Dynamic SLAM technology. Once you have that, anyone anywhere can instantly generate a 3D model. It’s almost as easy as generating a 2D image.

AREA: Does it require a lot of training to learn how to do the 3D capture?

KEN LEE: Absolutely not. You just grab the object in your hand, rotate it around and make sure all the views are okay, press the button, and then boom, you’ve got a fully-textured high-resolution 3D model. It takes less than a minute. You can teach a five-year-old to do it.

AREA: Tell us about your sales model. You are selling to companies that are embedding the technology in their products, but are you also selling directly to companies and users?

KEN LEE: Our business model is a licensing model, so we license our SDK on a per-unit basis. We want to stay with that. We want to stay as a core technology company for the time being. We don’t have any immediate plan for our own products.

AREA: Without giving away any trade secrets, what’s next in the product pipeline for VanGogh imaging?

KEN LEE: We just filed a patent on how to stream 3D models to remote areas in real time. Basically, we’ll be able to immediately capture any object or scene, as soon as you turn on the camera, as a true 3D model streaming in real time, through a low bandwidth wireless data network.

AREA: Do you have any advice for companies that are just getting into augmented reality and looking at their options?

KEN LEE: At this moment, Augmented Reality platforms are still immature. I would recommend that companies focus, not on technology, but on solving industry problems. What are the problems that the companies are facing and where could AR add unique value? Right now, the biggest challenge in the AR industry, and the reason why it hasn’t taken off yet, is that so much money has gone into building platforms, but no one has built real solutions for companies. I think they should look for opportunity in those spaces.

Taken from a press release on Business Wire dated Feb 13 2017.

Cubic Global Defense (CGD), a business unit of Cubic Corporation announced that Andre Balta, Chief Technical Manager of CGD’s Orlando operations, will be the sole defense industry representative on a government panel discussing Virtual and Augmented Reality for Naval Aviation Training at WEST 2017 in San Diego from February 21–23.

In addition, Cubic’s business divisions, CGD and Cubic Mission Solutions will showcase the latest in air combat and maritime virtual training systems as well as end-to-end Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance solutions.

Co-sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International and the U.S. Naval Institute, WEST is the premier naval conference on the West Coast, bringing military and industry leaders together to network and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies for the Sea Service community.

“Cubic’s vast array of innovations puts us at the forefront of military training, mission support and end-to-end C4ISR solutions,” said retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dave Buss, president of Cubic Global Defense. “We remain committed to providing our customers with the most effective, efficient and proven technologies to advance their aviation and maritime training and support their C4ISR capabilities for the most critical expeditions.”

At the event, Andre Balta will participate in the following panel:

• WEST Theater: Virtual/Augmented Reality in Naval Aviation Training: A Window into the Future.
  Wednesday, February 22, 1:40 – 2:40 p.m. (local time); Row 1900 on the Exhibit Hall Floor, San Diego Convention Center.

Cubic will also showcase advanced training and comprehensive C4ISR solutions.

Following the emergence of a recently leaked photo of Magic Leap’s prototype, reports this week have suggested details about Magic Leap’s new Augmented Reality product. According to various articles, such as the one in iTechPost.com, Magic Leap’s Augmented Reality hardware prototype is essentially a backpack.  A recently leaked image appears to reveal the interesting bit of hardware that comes with a simple clear casing allowing viewers to see the parts powering the visor attached by a thick cable. In the center, the board features a massive set of heat sinks, sitting on top of the GPU or CPU for the device.

What seems to be a USB port appears on the side of the board. The device is a specially-made desktop PC that resembles recent VR backpack PC’s made by HP, but tightly integrated with Magic Leap’s proprietary software and hardware.

A large battery pack can be seen in the wearer’s left hand. Rumors alleged that the device’s design had changed significantly since this prototype.

If Magic Leap is working on finalizing a consumer design and the hardware is mostly ready, this would corroborate previous reports that the company is preparing to launch the hardware on the market soon. The prototype hardware was referred by the leaker as “PEQ0.” Since the “PEQ” designation is reportedly meaning prototype, the 0 numeration could mean that this prototype is the initial design for prototyping or the very first one produced, which makes sense given the expandable port layout and the clear board.

The first Magic Leap Augmented Reality prototype was the size of a refrigerator. In order to enable images to have more depth and to look more realistic, it used a projector with a motorized lens. The articles states that the company plans to commercially release a final product in the form of spectacles.

Magic Leap has also attracted some negative media attention this week following a lawsuit on workplace sexism filed against the company by a former female executive.

Augmented reality startup Meta has hired longtime industry veteran Kari Pulli to serve as Chief Technology Officer of its core products division, so say a number of articles today (e.g. bizjournals).

Pulli has worked in senior positions at Nokia and Nvidia, most recently serving as CTO of Intel’s Imaging and Camera Technologies group, Meta said in a statement on Monday.

The San Mateo-based startup, Meta, makes an augmented reality headset that costs $950. It differs from other AR headsets like Google Glass in that people can interact with, and virtually pick up, holographic objects in the field of view. Promotional videos from the company suggest facial recognition could be coming, so that you could pull up supplemental information about a person and their work as you’re talking to them.

Eventually, proponents of augmented reality say, this tech will be small enough to fit discreetly in conventional-looking glasses — or even eventually inside contact lenses. Today, though, the Meta 2 headset still looks like a somewhat clunky, futuristic pair of ski goggles.

Pulli’s research has been nearly exclusively in cameras, imaging and augmented reality technology. Prior to joining Intel, he worked as a vice president at Palo Alto-based Light, helping develop software that combined multiple images from multiple cameras into a single high-resolution image.

Meta launched in 2012 and was accepted into Y Combinator’s summer 2013 class. It’s raised an estimated $73 million to date, and is led by CEO Meron Gribetz.