BKT Tires is one of the leading specialty tire suppliers, providing tires for industrial, mining and agricultural vehicles. This post on the company’s blog features how Augmented Reality could be useful to customers in the field needing to maintain or service their products, showing that even heavy machinery operators could have Augmented Reality-assisted information products in the future.
In an interview with Manufacturing.net, Bob Meads spoke about the iQagent platform. iQagent, an AREA Sponsor member, provides Augmented Reality-enabling features to software and hardware used on the manufacturing floor to minimize downtime and enable real time resource visualization on the plant floor. The company’s trials with large customers have demonstrated tangible impacts and expanding deployments in 205 will shed greater light on the benefits of Augmented Reality to the bottom line.
New developments in the field of Augmented Reality are set in perspective with research activities over the past 20 years in this feature article on Ars Technica. The author interviews AREA Sponsor member iQagent as well as Arnie Lund, Connected Experience Labs (CEL) research organization at GE Software, and offers readers a down-to-earth view on what’s currently available as well as what customers can expect in the near future.
In this press release issued today by Index AR Solutions the company announced that it has hired executives that will focus on introduction of enterprise Augmented Reality in marine and naval engineering industries. Based on the company’s close relationships with the AREA member Newport News Shipbuilding Augmented Reality group, the company will be able to leverage its experience and know how in large scale manufacturing and operations.
The excitement about Microsoft’s new Augmented Reality hardware increased the attention this category of product has been receiving in the press over the past few months. In this article on PC Pro, the authors speculate about HoloLens specifications, price point and availability date in the UK. It is hard to say how close they are but very valuable for early customers to gain insights on future product strengths and shortcomings.
NBC News has published an opportunity analysis about enterprise Augmented Reality featuring some of the new models of smart glasses and the DAQRI Smart Helmet in which the Gartner Group analyst, Tuong Nguyen states that many companies are evaluating Augmented Reality for field service and other use cases. Nguyen predicts that the prototypes could be in widespread use in three years or less.
In this research paper recently accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education conference (ITiCSE 2015), the results of an Augmented Reality-assisted learning study indicate the difficulty with implementing AR for real time improvements in robot programming. The study participants performed significantly fewer actions between the runs and took significantly less time to complete the tasks. Using Augmented Reality students identified possible errors in their programs more quickly and more precisely, so they had a better understanding of the necessary steps and were addressing smaller problems at a time.
The Qatar Petrochemical Company has revealed that it is beginning to collaborate with the leading university in the region to research the development of use cases in which AR-assisted courseware for students studying to work in the oil and gas sector would be beneficial for learning and certification. An article on QatarIsBooming web site sheds light on the vision of the executives who approved the collaborative agreement. This could be the first such initiative in the world and would certainly be closely followed by other companies in the industry.
In this article on the FRAMOS site, the company explains the factors that Laster, the French provider of smart glasses for enterprise Augmented Reality, used when evaluating their image capture partner for the latest generation of optical see-through AR technology. The companies collaborated to develop components that have high resolution in a variety of lighting conditions, avoid impacts of rolling shutter and smallest size package.
In January, DHL announced results of a trial in the Netherlands showing that picker performance could increased by 25% with the support of hands-free displays and Augmented Reality. This article in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the DHL will continue its smart glasses trials in other facilities in order to study benefits to customers.