The technology for visualizing information in Augmented Reality view is already available if users are able to hold up a tablet or use a stationary AR projection system. But most use cases could benefit from having high performance, light weight and low cost smart glasses. Reaching the customer requirements is a challenge with today’s technologies.

Photonics technology and LED arrays are playing a key role in the next generation of Augmented Reality using smartglasses, according to this post on the Optics.org blog. The post describes five projects and technologies to illustrate the kinds of components needed, the state of the art for those components and how are they being used in military, medical and manufacturing industries.

Experts note that the main challenges are to provide glasses with high transparency, a large field of view and good visual comfort.

Many companies are beginning to group wearable technologies into their mobility initiatives. While this can help leverage common assets and introduce the wearable technology into accepted processes, it may prevent users from accessing the unique benefits of wearable technologies. Smartglasses or personal head-mounted displays are special because they allow employees to “connect to the information generated in an IoT environment while remaining hands-on in the manufacturing process,” Brian Ballard points out in this feature story on the New Equipment Digest web site.

Ballard also promotes in his article the fact that most smartglasses are not only head-mounted displays. By using new user interfaces the worker actually has the opportunity to document deviations or new processes and becomes a digital contributor in the factory’s IoT network.

This article also provides valuable recommendations for the evaluation of use cases and the slow and measured introduction of Augmented Reality in manufacturing. While focusing on automotive and aerospace industries, where Augmented Reality-assisted systems have already gained some attention, the same recommends could be applied to other industries as well.

Researchers have proposed a system for automatically republishing technical documentation (user manuals and work instructions) as Augmented Reality content for viewing with AR-enabled devices such as smart glasses.

Peter Mohr et al. presented the paper, “Retargeting Technical Documentation to Augmented Reality” at the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The proposed system effectively permits single sourcing (republishing) of Augmented Reality content from existing work instructions in an automatic manner by transforming CAD models and 2D technical illustrations into 3D virtual objects for overlaying the physical world.

The proposed system adds yet another publishing channel to sets of work instructions (beyond paper and 2D online documentation) and would enable cost savings and economies of scale by reducing the amount of manual work to design and develop stand-alone guided AR scenarios.

National, regional and local governments are keenly aware that they must use the latest technologies to manage their assets in the physical world as well as to engage with citizens and constituents they serve. Getting from the concept to the implementation, however, can take a long time and the investments must be clear to the public or financial managers.

In this new market research update published by Frost and Sullivan, analysts have identified five key trends surrounding Augmented Reality in government. The highest level of interest is in supporting the safety and security operations managed by government agencies. Those with police and fire protection duties as well as border and transportation security staff can make better informed decisions as well as increase situation awareness in emergency situations using Augmented Reality-assisted systems.

Frost and Sullivan customers will access the market insight to learn the names of vendors and use cases analysts have studied.

AREA Member APX Labs CEO Brain Ballard offers his company’s insights into the trends surrounding Google’s smartglasses in the workplace in this post in the MIT Technology Review blog. While APX Labs offers software and solutions that accompany the devices provided by Vuzix and Epson as well, Ballard says that Google Glass are in highest demand. Companies order units of 50 or more at a time.

The recent increase in interest, says Ballard, is in part the result of customers being better informed. Customers who have experimented with Google Glass in 2014 understand the limitations and advantages of their use in factories or other settings where workers need both hands to perform a task.

In general, there are more uses for products like Google Glass in the workplace than in the home or daily lives of consumers.

Following recent coverage of Amazon’s alleged workplace practices in the news and social media, fears of workplace monitoring are increasingly an issue of concern for workers and managers with new technologies. In this post on The Guardian web site, the author suggests that with devices sending emails and notifications throughout the day, such as is possible with Google Glass, workers may suffer from information overload.

Questions about recording video and audio, whether in terms of a manager’s demanding your first-person footage of a task, or simply the danger of an entire workforce becoming walking CCTV cameras are raised. It’s unfortunate that the post does not in any way attempt to rank the different types of concerns or suggest the opinions of experts who have studied workplace performance when using smartglasses and other advanced technologies.

The AREA members are studying these issues and developing recommendations for their management.

Technical communicators see great potential for the use of Augmented Reality to deliver information to users in context in real time. But they are also finding it difficult to integrate Augmented Reality into existing information products. A new technical committee focusing AR use in technical communication and information products has been announced in a press release issued by OASIS.

Future standards developed by the new OASIS Augmented Reality for Information Products (ARIP) Technical Committee could reduce the need for custom software development by those who seek to offer an alternative way to view digital documentation. OASIS ARIP was initiated by Huawei out of a desire to integrate the benefits of AR into their own technical communications.

Each year Gartner Group publishes a simple graphic to express the way its analysts feel different emerging technologies are evolving with respect to their likelihood to meet the expectations of users. Augmented Reality has been evaluated for at least five years.

While many use the graphic to guide IT purchasing decisions, it is important to note that the analysts who prepare this annual assessment are not focused more heavily on enterprise than consumer markets. They also make no distinction between the measures of satisfaction.

This year, in Gartner’s figure published in a press release, Augmented Reality is entering the deepest section in the trough of disillusionment with between 5 and 10 years before it fulfills the promise of productivity. For enterprise customers, the time to productivity will depend highly on the use case and the key performance indicators the customer expects to impact. As those who read this news feed realize, and the AR for Enterprise Alliance observes daily, many in industry and enterprise that have tasks to perform in the physical world and realistic expectations will be gaining benefits much sooner.

In this post on the Augmensys blog, the author analyzes the disruptive effects of having an ecosystem of Augmented Reality technology providers that is insufficiently big and developed to withstand acquisitions, such as that of Metaio by Apple. Although the emphasis is on the benefits of the company’s proprietary system, it raises the important point that if Augmented Reality is to be considered a sustainable component of enterprise IT systems, it must be able to shift to new suppliers as the conditions change.

The point remains that those who focus on and work towards the development of discreet “apps” for specific tasks are unable to expand quickly either. Augmented Reality technologies, regardless of their supplier — internal or third party — need to be viewed as “just another component” in a digital thread that delivers better performance and results. Focusing on results, instead of the tools that we use to deliver them, is another lesson that is hard for engineers to learn, but essential for the adoption of Augmented Reality.

Although things have changed since the end of the Cold War, many countries continue to invest in the latest technologies for their defense forces. Many Augmented Reality projects being introduced today are based on prior work for the military or defense sector.

In this short bulletin on Sputnik News website, Russian Armed Forces and others in the defense industry are exploring the introduction of helmets for pilots in combat. In the scenario described in the post, the pilot may be able to aim there weapons without using their hands with an Augmented Reality equipped helmet.