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.

In this paper published in the International Journal of Geospatial Information special issue on “Efficient Capturing of 3D Objects at a National Level: With a Focus on Buildings and Infrastructure,” the authors present a taxonomy for 3D city model use cases based on their review of over 400 published works on the topic of using 3D city models.

The taxonomy distinguishes between use cases that visualize information and those that lead to other results (non-visualization). Of the 24 use cases involving visualization of 3D city data, the authors note that many could be adapted to involve one or more real world places using Augmented Reality-assisted visualization. But an even greater number of the use cases describe how having a 3D city model can be the basis for enhanced Augmented Reality experiences in urban environments. For example, use cases that involve visualizing human activity, wind fields, and air quality data may be the basis for suggested routes to take in a navigation use case.

This in-depth catalog could be inspiration for others to document use cases for Augmented Reality-assisted visualization.

Researchers at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia have published a scientific paper about the 4Any framework for mobile Augmented Reality systems and experience development. The framework is composed of layers for actors, profiles and metadata to be shared, and for visualizing scenarios. In the same paper, the researchers describe ArcHIVE, a pilot system developed to test the framework and provide a link to the code generated by the implementation.

According to the 4Any framework, the ArcHIVE system architecture provides a metadata layer to retrieve, deploy, create, update or delete customization information, such as custom object definitions and page layouts, which are tailored to the user profile defined by the actor layer. Django, an open source mobile application authoring environment that uses the Python scripting language to provide a web/database interface that is well supported, scalable, and easy to maintain, was used to code the pilot system.

As computing power increases and costs decrease, many technologies previously confined to motion picture studios, such as capturing temporally consistent 3D models of dynamic scenes from real world imagery, are becoming suitable for other environments. Consequently, the European Conference for Visual Media Production which has long been a forum for presenting computer graphics and video research for motion pictures, is rising in relevance on the list of events where research valuable to enterprise Augmented Reality is likely to be presented and published.

One example is the paper Dr. Stefan Rueger of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the Open University presented on the topic of new methods for monocular markerless motion capture. Another is the keynote given by Dr. Lourdes Agapito, Professor of 3D Vision and member of the Vision and Imaging Science group and the Centre for Inverse Problems in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). Her research in Computer Vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from the video acquired from a single moving camera.

Agapito’s keynote focused on a “model-free” framework developed by her group at UCL to acquire fully dense “per-pixel” 3D models of deformable objects solely from video. Using a template-based, sequential and direct method of tracking deformable surfaces with only an RGB camera could be highly valuable for Augmented Reality. In addition, Agapito described a unified approach to 3D modelling of dynamic scenes that simultaneously segments the scene into different objects and decomposes these into parts while reconstructing them in 3D. This approach allows the acquisition of more semantically meaningful 3D representations of a scene. She concluded by discussing recent work on correlations in the variation of 3D shapes across objects of the same class that could address the problem of category-based reconstruction.

While these frameworks and approaches are not currently possible in real time, they could increase the ease and lower the cost of real world environment capture, permitting more frequent capture and higher reliability recognition and tracking of static and dynamic objects in real world scenes.

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.