Corporation Pop, a digital agency company, has received £50,000 of funding in order to develop a hospital app which uses Augmented Reality and artificial intelligence to help young patients in the UK National Health Service, according to an article by Business Cloud.

An avatar on the Patient’s Virtual Guide keeps children company and gives them information as they pass through the system, reducing stress and anxiety about their treatment and surroundings.

Dom Raban, Corporation Pop MD has said, “This is a very personal project for me. In 2011 my then 13-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer…Thankfully my daughter will soon be celebrating five years cancer free, but her experience left me wanting to use my professional capability to respond to the problem and find a technology solution that could meet the information needs of young people about to embark on an often traumatic and stressful hospital journey. With this fantastic support from Nominet Trust we can now begin the next crucial stage of development.”

According to the article, Corporation Pop has worked on the project for almost two years and last year received funding from NHS technology network TITCH.

Peter-Marc Fortune, associate clinical head at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and Corporation Pop’s clinical consultant, said: “I have yet to show the pilot app to anyone – of any age – who has not positively engaged with it. This technology has the potential to greatly improve the healthcare experience for people of all ages across the NHS.”

Augumenta, a company supplying Augmented Reality applications and development tools to organizations that use Smartglasses, are developing AR applications with the introduction of Augumenta Studio.

This is a cloud-based tool which allows developers to quickly design AR applications for smartglass-equipped workers using pre-built templates, libraries of control elements such as meters and gauges, and Augumenta’s virtual surface tools and gesture-control software.

Augumenta Studio supports the application design for the Augumenta SmartPanel application template. It allows workers with Smartglasses can see and operate virtual control panels for machines that appear as a blank surface to others. It’s used to set-up the virtual control panel, providing highly configurable and flexible human-machine interaction for industrial, commercial and IoT applications.

Tero Aaltonen, Co-Founder and CEO of Augumenta says, “Augmented Reality provides manufacturing organizations with real-time access to critical factory data and the ability to control machines and production lines without accessing a physical control station, resulting in shorter problem-solving times and greater shop floor efficiency.”

The Augumenta SmartPanel and SmartAlert application templates give enterprise customers and developers an unprecedented level of flexibility paired with privacy and security. Displays are completely configurable and only an authorized smartglass user is able to view data and controls. Displays also can contain different information and controls based on the user’s role. This is useful not just in industrial applications but also in operating medical monitoring and diagnostic systems.

An article released this week by VR Room discusses the companies with heavy investment in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Facebook gets a mention, as does Venture capital firm Rothenberg Ventures who it is claimed has made 32 investments in the industry.

Worldwide revenues for the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality market are projected to approach $14 billion in 2017, according to research by the IDC. But that’s forecast to explode to $143 billion by 2020.  Increased investment is leading to hiring sprees for AR/VR jobs.

The article provides graphs to show which companies have invested the most in AR/VR investments and acquisitions.  Additionally, there is a graph showing the most AR/VR job listings on LinkedIn such as Microsoft and INTEL.

This article with the graphs can be seen and read in full here.

In a recent article this week by Silicon, Wearables in the workplace are discussed:

• What are the potential benefits enterprise could receive if they used wearables in the work place?
• What are the barriers to adoption?
• What are the opportunities businesses could achieve by using them in the workplace?

This article discussed the market with information from the IDC stating how much the market has grown, competitors and the overall performers in that market. Broken down into 3 sections the market, hurdles and concerns and benefits are discussed.

Benefits of wearables in the workplace mentioned in the report:

• Help boost collaboration
• Increased efficiency
• Track location of personnel
• Provide health information

“Wearables can provide major benefits for businesses, if deployed correctly,” said Chas Moloney, director of Ricoh UK. “One of the most obvious areas is health and wellbeing initiatives for staff, with numerous applications to support with fitness and working patterns already widely available. But there are also clear business cases for wearable devices being deployed into office-based environments. For example giving workers instant access to data and managing complex processes could easily be achieved through a smart watch or other device.” 

Imagine an aircraft service facility where the maintenance crew has the actual performance data of each plane’s engine components right at their fingertips as soon as it arrives – including identification of faulty parts and step-by-step instructions on how to replace them.

That combination of IoT data and AR visualization is incredibly powerful. It promises to reduce downtime, ensure timely and appropriate maintenance, and prevent more costly repairs. And because these technologies can guide service technicians instantly to only the areas in need of repair – and provide hard data on when to replace a worn part before it fails – they can make service technicians significantly more productive and assets more reliable. However, there are still questions about this integration of AR and IoT:

• How close is that scenario to reality?
• What technologies are essential to making it happen?
• What obstacles stand in the way?

To get the answers to these and other questions, you don’t want to miss the AREA’s upcoming webinar, Friends or Enemies – What is the Relationship Between Augmented Reality and IoT?  The event will be held May 17, 2017 at 8 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern/4 PM UK/5 PM CET.

Speakers on the program include: Marc Schuetz, Director of ThingWorx Studio Product Management at PTC; Pontus Blomberg, Founder & VP, Business Development at 3D Studio Blomberg Ltd.; Carl Byers, Chief Strategy Officer of Contextere; and Giuseppe Scavo, Researcher, AR for Enterprise Alliance (AREA). AREA Executive Director Mark Sage will host.

What other use cases will benefit from the intersection of IoT and AR? What types of organizations and industries are best positioned to derive value from such solutions? Find out at the free webinar.  Register now to join us.

An article on Enterprise Innovation Net speaks of 5 technologies that are transforming and disrupting the future of production. Included in the report are Wearables and Augmented Reality, the Internet of Things, Advanced Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing. The full report can be read here, however, the wearables and Augmented Reality section connected with future production will be of most interest to our readers and is reproduced below:

Wearables and Augmented Reality (AR)

Technology for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is disrupting the market and the article says it could become the next computing platform, following personal computers and smartphones. These technologies fundamentally shift the way that information is relayed to the user, offering immediate access to critical data.

Wearables, AR and VR present valuable use cases for quality inspection, work instructions, training, workflow management, operations and safety, logistics and maintenance.

Wearables can offer value across multiple dimensions in production:

• Productivity improvements through communication, data digitalization and IoT integration
• Health and fitness wearables will lead to improved health, fewer safety incidents and reduced insurance premiums.
• AR and wearables will lead to improved quality through remote verification, automatic mistake proofing and live, step-by-step instruction/documentation
• VR and wearables will lead to significant reduction in workforce training costs and increased training effectiveness.
• VR will be an integral part of design methodology and design for manufacturability, reducing time to market for new products.

Industries with a high labour cost or high cost of mistakes have the greatest potential to achieve a significant return on investment with these technologies disrupting industry.

In a recent report released this week, QY Research released a market report on the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality App Market.  Major players included in the report are Aurasma, Blippar, Catchoom, DAQRI and Wikitude. Catchoom and DAQRI are members of The AREA.

This report has been segmented based upon applications, end-users, technology and geography.

The Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Apps research report also offer comprehensive assessment of the AR and VR Apps Market and consists of historical data, scope, significant approaches and statistical data of the global market.

Some highlights from this report include:

• A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent market.
• Important changes in market dynamics
• Market segmentation up to the second or third level
• Historical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volume
• Reporting and evaluation of recent industry developments
• Market shares and strategies of key players
• Emerging niche segments and regional markets

This report also contains and evaluates the range of factors of the Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Apps industry, such as definition, demands, share, analysis, supply, sales, size, specification, forecast trends, production, classification, industry policy, news and application. This report will also provide significant and reliable information on the market clearly in structed format and offers a key manufacturer of the products, applications, DROS and others.

In a report released this week, research by Tractica reveals that the mobile AR market will grow from 342.8 million unique monthly active users to nearly 1.9 billion monthly active users from 2016 – 2022. Tractica, the market intelligence firm also believe that worldwide mobile AR revenue will rise from $749.0 million to $18.5 billion annually.

Principal Analyst, Mark Beccue said, “While it was once imagined that mobile AR, using smartphones and tablets, would be the strict purview of consumer use cases, the slow development of smart glasses married with the practicality and the ubiquity of mobile devices has opened legitimate, sustainable markets for enterprise use cases as well,”

 This market report provides global mobile AR market forecasts from 2014 to 2022. The report is segmented into different sections including regions, consumer use cases (Social Media, Gaming and Entertainment, E-commerce, Mapping/Indoor Navigation, Visual Search and Toys) Enterprise use cases such as education, plant maintenance, Field Service and B2B sales tools). The report also includes an in-depth analysis on 30 key industry participants.

AREA Member BrainXChange has summarised for their readers information from a webinar “What’s Next: Preparing Your Organization for Enterprise Wearables.”  Speakers on the webinar were:

Chris Croteau, General Manager of Head-worn Devices at Intel

Jay Kim, Chief Strategy Officer of Upskill (formerly APX Labs)

BrainXChange have prepared 3 takeaways from the webinar:

1. Know where you’re coming from to get to where you’re going

2. Start with structured information within your current systems of record

3. Take a layered approach to security

The full summary by BrainXChange can be read in full here.

Readers may be interested in the recently released Global AR Market Forecast to 2027 by types, by application, by end users, Industry Trends and Analysis Forecast. 

This market report splits up the market into many segments. A key finding is that one of the major growths for this market is caused by the adoption of 3D visualization in the healthcare sector. Key players mentioned in this report include some of AREA’s members and other well known technology names, with the Key Players Including:

• DAQRI
• PTC
• Blippar
• Magic Leap
• Total Immersion
• Qualcomm Inc
• Google
• Microsoft
• Apple
• Sony

The market is segmented into type such as sensors, display, processors, semiconductor, hardware and software and also segmented by application such as consumer electronics, commercial, healthcare, automobile, and logistics among others.

This report also provides:

• A detailed analysis of the market structure along with a forecast for the next 10 years
• Insights about factors affecting the market growth
• Provides a historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub segments
• Enables to analyse the AR Market based on factors such as – Price analysis, supply chain analysis etc.
• Offers strategic profiling of key players in the market

A sample of this report can be requested below.

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1143