A recent post written by David Gilbert for the International Business Times suggests that Augmented Reality (among other “new realities”) will be one of the trending themes of the upcoming CES event. After summarizing how important CES is becoming for the automotive industry, Gilbert mentions that many vendors will be introducing their latest wearable technologies for enhancing human experience.

Recognizing that Augmented Reality wearables are diversifying and becoming increasingly important, CES judges selected several Vuzix products and nominated the company for eight Innovation Awards. Osterhout Design Group announced that ODG R-7 Smart Glasses was named the top product in the Tablets, E-Readers and Mobile Computing product category and also received an Innovation Award.

The CES 2016 exhibition hall will feature a special AR and VR zone and, during the CES 2016 conference taking place in the Las Vegas Convention Center, experts from NVIDIA and Osterhout will be discussing emerging trends in Augmented Reality.

Conversations on these topics will continue after hours on January 6 during the AREA networking event for people interested in enterprise Augmented Reality and members.

According to a press release issued by Vuzix, the company has formed a partnership with AREA founding sponsor member Atheer and will be adding the Atheer Air Platform to the applications available for use with Vuzix M100 smart glasses for the purpose of delivering live remote expert collaboration. The Atheer AiR Suite for Enterprise will assist professionals to see checklists and step-by-step procedures in their smart glasses.

The use will be able to interaction with information using simple gestures, voice, or head motion. Further, the Air Suite brings experts to the support of a remote user via video calling features. Guidance, including real-time image annotations, permits tasks to be completed more quickly and with fewer errors.

The AiR Suite also includes a task flow authoring tool that will allow enterprise developers to create smart glasses-optimized procedures and task flows with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Apparently investors felt that this relationship brings significant value to Vuzix. The company’s share price rose 15.17% or $1.09 following the news according to an analysis of the announcement published by the Independent Reporter the following day.

In this post on TechCrunch, investor Court Westcott explains why Augmented Reality will be important for everyone. Westscott is excited about the potential for Augmented Reality to make information more accessible more quickly to more people. The post compares the impact of what he terms the “Law of Information Accessibility” with Moore’s Law which is commonly understood, even by those who are not involved in information technology.

Westscott, one of the investors in Metaio, which was acquired by Apple earlier in 2015, then proposes that with computer vision being added to so many new devices and services, the shift in information accessibility will profoundly change humans. It will, Westscott suggests, be analogous to when evolutionary pressure resulted in animals with sight surviving better than those without. Westscott concedes that the equivalent of a “Cambrian explosion” in human knowledge as a result of vastly improved information accessibility, will only begin when technologies converge sufficiently to deliver cost effective and highly optimized hands-free and head-worn displays.

The period which marked a burst of evolutionary change in life forms on Earth, known as the “Cambrian explosion,” lasted about 53 million years. Fortunately, technology (including Moore’s law) is advancing quickly. And, although no one knows precisely when display devices will be suitable for sustained use by everyone for 100% information accessibility, we can assert with confidence that at least some rare and complex tasks can already be supported and improved by intermittent professional use of existing devices using computer vision and Augmented Reality.

Chinese technology leaders see huge potential for Augmented Reality to impact the daily lives of citizens and their customers. According to an editorial on the South China Morning Post website, the CEO of Tencent, Pony Ma, shared with attendees of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province that he feels Augmented Reality is how people will interact with everything around them.

Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong was quoted as saying “What used to be impossible will become possible,” as a result of artificial intelligence. More specifically, the quote refers to how, with the assistance of advanced algorithms and big data, technology will replace most of people’s simple intelligent work. Li went on to predict that the technological breakthroughs brought about as a result of artificial intelligence will have a greater impact on humanity than the industrial revolution.

On the tail of an 11-city showcase tour, Microsoft is making the Hololens experience available for those developers who want to test it under controlled settings in the Microsoft Manhattan store. Magazine and blog editors were the first to release their reviews.

In an article published on the PC Magazine web site, Dan Costa, Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com, describes the current model’s features. The Hololens model being demonstrated to those who visit the store’s special area dedicated for developers is wireless, greatly improving the ease of testing. Before “strapping on” the device, the user’s interpupillary distance is measured and used to set the optics of the Hololens. This adjustment is necessary to produce the desired holographic experiences. The fit of the device is similar to ski goggles and adjusted using two straps.

The experiences Microsoft is showing the media are set in a home environment and emphasize entertainment use cases, such as games, education and story telling. These experiences showcase the integration with Microsoft’s consumer hardware such as Xbox. One of the demonstrations uses PowerPoint and a 3D animation application to support the creation of an object that can then be printed on a 3D printer. Costa was most enthusiastic about the Project X-Ray demonstration, a immersive shooter game featuring robot aliens.

In other reports published on the same day by other news outlets, there is some debate over the selection of use cases for demonstrations. In Engadget’s editorial about the latest Hololens demonstrations, the author suggests that Microsoft is also (or perhaps more) interested in attracting enterprise use case developers.

Microsoft has also set up an online Hololens developer support environment for gathering insights on use cases of interest. The Microsoft HoloLens Share Your Idea Program is open until January 11, 2016. This closely resembles the AREA’s own enterprise use cases submission form released the same week as the Microsoft HoloLens Share Your Idea Program.

Bosch has announced that it plans to acquire a minority stake in Reflekt GmbH, a provider of Augmented Reality services and software with which it has been working for the past two years.

In the press release issued by Bosch Dr. Eng. Hans-Peter Meyen, Member of the Divisional Board of the Bosch Automotive Aftermarket division is quoted as predicting that enterprise Augmented Reality in all industries and, more specifically, in the automotive aftermarket, will save time and reduce costs. The release goes on to describe the Common Application Platform (CAP) developed by the two partners. As part of the total solution for enterprise and industry customers, Bosch offers licensing of the CAP system combined with consulting, engineering and complete authoring services.

Automotive industry news outlets covered the announcement, demonstrating the interest level in this development. In light of the global media coverage and high interest in the latest automotive technology industry trends at CES, visitors may see demonstrations and learn more about the Bosch Automotive Aftermarket division’s Augmented Reality system in the Bosch CES booth in Las Vegas Convention Center North Hall.

AREA Founding Sponsor Member Atheer announced that it has raised $14 million in Series B financing. In the title post on the Wall Street Journal Daily Startup blog, the announcement that Signatures Capital and Streamlined Ventures led the round caught the eye of investors. The round also included Fang Group, FundersClub, RONA Holdings and Shanda Group. The new funding brings Atheer’s total raised to $25 million, including $2 million raised by gesture recognition software provider ONtheGO Platforms, which it acquired earlier this month.

This is on the heels of another announcement on November 18, 2015 that AREA Founding Sponsor Member APX Labs similarly closed a round of $13M financing for its smart glasses software platform.

“Hands free” is a simple concept but when someone uses their hands in the physical world, they also need ways to “naturally” control the digital world assets they want to use. Automatic gesture recognition is one of the ways of interacting with digital content on hands-free delivery platforms. It’s not built into the optics or some other component before a smart glasses manufacturer introduces it.

For Atheer, an AREA sponsor member and provider of the AiR platform, gesture recognition is and has been a strategic differentiator. That position was deepened with the acquisition of ONtheGO Platforms, a developer of gesture recognition technology. In a press release issued by Atheer, the company states that ONtheGO adds three issued and six pending patents to Atheer’s IP portfolio of gesture interaction and rich visuality technologies, bringing the total to 14 issued patents and nearly 50 additional pending patents.

These technologies will be further integrated and gradually introduced in future editions of the Atheer AiR Glasses and the collaboration-centric AiR Enterprise Suite.

We spend a lot of time looking at flat objects and surfaces but, in reality, the world is mostly three dimensional. That’s why enterprises need support for 3D capture and visualization of 3D assets in their Augmented Reality systems. As obvious as it sounds and as fundamental a requirement for success it is, stable and robust 3D tracking is very difficult on any platform, especially for mobile devices.

That said, most authoring and delivery systems worthy of consideration for enterprise Augmented Reality offer 3D tracking for small and simple objects with texture. The more texture the better. A few months ago, Wikitude introduced a beta of 3D for small spaces in their SDK. They designed it to work on a space about the size of a desk.

As the size of the 3D space a system maps increases, the challenges change. There are more shadows and occlusions. There is more potential for calibration issues. Outdoor differs completely from indoors. Getting 3D to work reliably in large spaces is not easy. The author of this post on the Wikitude blog explains how computer vision engineers have tackled the problem and have released the first beta of their SDK’s new 3D tracking features.

Download the WikiWings Android app to test it first hand, if you want to test the current state of their technology.

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.