The tech media is ablaze with the announcement that Amazon has been awarded a patent by the US Patent Office for a novel hands-free display system. This post on Recode.net is among those which points out that, unlike many other hands-free displays, the proposed Amazon system, described at the time of filing in 2013, relies on a tablet or another companion computing device.

Amazon’s patent also covers the ability for the display to switch between transparent and opaque properties upon the user’s request. When the display is opaque, the system produces a fully immersive experience. This can be either for looking at still images, watching video content or interacting in a VR world. When transparent, the system supports Augmented Reality experience delivery.

Of course, there remains significant investment between a patent and the introduction of a commercial hardware product. Getting hardware to commercial success is also a long term, expensive journey and the competition in this product class is steep.

Ralph Osterhout is the CEO of Osterhout Design Group. The inventor was interviewed on ABC Lateline about his vision of the world with hands-free displays and smart glasses. During the interview Osterhout predicted that devices like those his company provides will become ubiquitous.

The company’s primary customers to date have been government agencies, namely the armed forces. Osterhout predicts that devices for military and industry applications will eventually have Doppler technology, which he claimed could see through walls and detect a beating heart from up to 150 meters away. Fortunately, technologies used in devices planned for mass market adoption will significantly diverge from those used in combat.

The fact that Augmented Reality delivery and presentation hardware and experience authoring software continue to be tightly bundled is one of the most challenging aspects of delivering Augmented Reality experiences for enterprise users. Authoring experiences for presentation on a variety of head-worn, hands-free displays requires the developer to use custom software for each model or class of display. Now consider the effort required to author experiences for a variety of automobiles when each manufacturer has customized hardware.

In a press release issued by Continental Automotive GmbH, the manufacturer and supplier of embedded systems for the automotive industry announced that Elektrobit, a wholly owned subsidiary, will build its own authoring software suite. The Electrobit AR Creator will enable the creation of Augmented Reality solutions to make driving safer and improve the driver experience. The company will continue to further develop the AR Creator as a software product and sell it to its customers, carmakers and tier 1 suppliers.

At the 2015 INFORMATIK conference there was high emphasis on Industry 4.0 topics. One of the papers presented by bitstars and published in the conference proceedings features the holobuilder platform. Contrary to what the name may suggest, this hosted platform is not designed for use with Microsoft HoloLens. It is an Augmented Reality experience authoring environment.

Based on WebGL, holobuilder produces experiences that, once the “holo player” is loaded, can run in a web browser and on any device.

The paper goes on to evaluate holobuilder against the six design principles for Industry 4.0. According to the authors:

1. Interoperability: holobuilder supports interoperability on two levels of abstraction. First, the platform enables machine-to-machine communication through OPC UA. Second, holobuilder itself has been realized as a web app running in any modern web browser. Hence, any appropriate mobile device can be used to monitor machines in a corresponding holobuilder-based AR scenario.
2. Virtualization: Since the platform enables the use of AR in smart factories, it clearly fuses the physical and the virtual world. Moreover, it leverages the advantages of OPC UA for monitoring physical processes by communicating with the monitored machines.
3. Decentralization: holobuilder supports the decentralization of smart factories since, e.g., interactive instruction manuals can be created separately for each machine (optionally with OPC UA capabilities). This facilitates decentralized monitoring and maintenance.
4. Real-Time Capability: AR scenarios such as interactive instruction manuals are applied in real time since the corresponding machine is viewed live through a camera. Also, in the case of an OPC UA–enabled holobuilder project, machine parameters are communicated in real time.
5. Service Orientation: Projects created with holobuilder are not specific to a machine and factory. That is, as long as the same marker is being detected by the platform, interactive instruction manuals and OPC UA–enabled projects can be applied across different smart factories. Also, holobuilder itself is a general platform not bound to any particular context. It can be used in any smart factory with any appropriate mobile device.
6. Modularity: The platform supports modular systems in smart factories, as it simplifies the process of adding, changing and monitoring individual components of machines.

Holobuilder Presentation

The successful commercialization of new enabling technology requires both financial support and special talents. The Columbia Tribune reports that the University of Missouri has selected an enterprise Augmented Reality project to receive a $100,000 grant to accelerate commercialization.

Described in this paper submitted for publication, Panacea’s Glass and Cloud is a system that leverages hands-free displays such as Google Glass and permits doctors to see what first responders see. The system uses its own wireless hot spot to support real time communication with hospital doctors following mass casualty disasters where other internet access is unavailable. Panacea’s Cloud system allows triage and coordination in the event there is no phone or internet service.

The system will be tested with MU ambulances the next month. Researchers also will be participating in a mass casualty simulation with Missouri Task Force 1, a federal urban search and rescue unit stationed at the Boone County Fire Protection District.

During the October 6 and 7, 2015 meeting of the grassroots community of people seeking to advance open and interoperable AR content and experiences, AREA Executive Director Christine Perey, presented the preliminary Enterprise AR Tool and Technology Provider Landscape Model.

The model segments technologies that are necessary for enterprise AR production and management. Technologies in the landscape leverage the underlying mobile and wearable hardware and software.

Segments identified and discussed include:

• Augmented Reality Delivery and Presentation System Providers
• AR Experience Authoring and Publishing Software Providers
• User Experience and Interface Technologies
• Recognition and Tracking Technologies
• AR-specific Hardware: capture, acceleration, optics

In a press release on October 12, 2015, PTC, a global provider of platforms and solutions that permit companies to create, operate, and service connected objects, announced that it has acquired the Vuforia technology, and its developer ecosystem, from Qualcomm Connected Experiences, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated.

The companies emphasized the potential for impact by drawing a direct line between Augmented Reality and visualization of Internet of Things data stored in and managed by PTC systems.

Developers using Vuforia have primarily been developing campaigns for brands, educational products and applications designed for entertainment so there will be significant effort needed to reshape their business models and skills to the needs of enterprise customers.

Jay Wright, VP of Vuforia, stated in the release “As part of PTC, Vuforia will allow developers to realize this potential through integration with PTC’s industry leading applications and ThingWorx IoT platform.” The statement does not address the matter of future support for popular third party systems that produce and consume data from connected products.

Augmented Reality tracking technology provider, Diotasoft, has announced that has changed its company name to DIOTA, and in the same event, launched a new software platform for enterprise Augmented Reality.

The company, a spin off the CEA Technology, a French government sponsored research center, has developed a client application it calls “DIOTAPLAYE.R” The companion system, DIOTACONNECT, establishes interfaces between the client application and systems such as Catia Composer or Unity3D to fetch CAD data or multimedia content, and assemble it automatically into a single DIOTAPLAYER project.

Sony has announced completion of its acquisition of Softkinetic Systems, causing speculation about Sony’s future plans in the AR domain across the industry.

Softkinetic was a leading provider of body-sensing and image-recognition technology. Many systems that produce 3D Augmented Reality acquire and use information such as that produced by Softkinetic technology embedded by and/or licensed by from the company by third parties. Sony’s announcement does not specify what it plans to do with the technology nor the terms of the deal.

The change in circumstances will likely cause those enterprise Augmented Reality system providers that currently license Softkinetic technology for gesture control to begin exploring alternate providers such as Thalmic Labs and Leap Motion.

During the October 6 and 7, 2015 meeting of the grassroots community of people seeking to advance open and interoperable AR content and experiences, one of the participants, Neil Trevett, President of Khronos Group and VP of Mobile, NVIDIA, shared his summary of the ISMAR 2015 conference.

The participants learned that the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics will begin publishing an annual “AR Edition” containing the ISMAR proceedings. In addition, Trevett summarized three of the science and technology papers that he felt were most interesting:

1. Very High Frame Rate Volumetric Integration of Depth Images on Mobile Devices, summarizing research performed at University of Oxford
2. MobileFusion: Real-time Volumetric Surface Reconstruction and Dense Tracking On Mobile Phones, also conducted at University of Oxford
3. Instant Outdoor Localization and SLAM Initialization from 2.5D Maps, summarizing research performed at Graz University of Technology, Austria