A few of the trends featured in the report include:

• No-collar workforce – humans and machines working together as equals.
• Digital reality – the next phase in the Augmented and Virtual Reality revolution.
• The new core – how core systems are driving digital convergence and destroying traditional boundaries of operation.
• Blockchain – Blockchain is moving from exploration into production scenarios, driven by increased adoption and advanced use cases.

This year’s theme of ‘the symphonic enterprise’ is focused on; this encompasses strategy, technology, and operations working together across domains. Also included in the report is the ‘Exponential Technology Watch List’, which discusses strategies for innovation ideas that may not manifest for five years or more in addition to the longer-term tech trends artificial intelligence and quantum encryption.

Bill Briggs, Chief Technology Officer and Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, is quoted to have said that many organisations ahead of the game are approaching disruptive change in relation to strategy. They are thinking more about use cases, deployment, and exploration more holistically, and how various disruptive technologies can join to fuel meaningful impact in the enterprise.

Briggs is also quoted to have said that traditional boundaries of organisation and technical scope is being transcended. New tech trends are enabling problems to be solved in a new way and for business opportunities to be uncovered.

LetinAR Co Ltd, a tech startup company, attended Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 with Pin Mirror Augmented Reality technology, revealed a press release on BusinessWire.

Various AR glasses considered major candidates for next-generation wearables have been released over the past few years by huge companies such as Microsoft and Google. Difficulties of these for commercialisation include:

• Over-sized form factor and weight
• Cause of dizziness
• Limited resolution

These limits are still unresolved due to the complication of optical systems making mass production more difficult. LetinAR will challenge these problems at MWC 2018 by introducing novel optical technology.

Advantages of the technology are said to be:

LetinAR’s tech provides 70 degrees of Field of View (FOV), never previously attained in a regular sized pair of glasses.

FOV can be extended effectively by manufacturers by arranging more pin mirrors in a single lens. The Pin Mirror Lens projects a sharp image from a 25cm range, enabling the device to be used for lengths of time without dizziness.

The Super-Thin Pin Mirror Lens allows for it to be fitted with thinner devices compared to ones with light-guides and half-mirrors. The simple structure of injection molded plastic lenses allows for mass production and will also help advance the period toAR commercialisation.

LetinAR has introduced client companies, investment companies, and cooperative companies to developing next-generation lenses.

Mozenix, based in the Vision Building in Dundee, was established last summer to test the commercial validity of AR technology.  Information sourced from an article that appeared on EnergyVoice.com.

Led by Michael Brown and Michael Romilly, who is a co-founder of Dundee mobile agency Waracle, they teamed up with Aberdeen software company Return to Scene to develop the mobile app for the energy sector.

The software uses the camera on a smartphone or tablet to recognise oil and gas structures and then bring up identification tags and information about them on screen.

Return To Scene’s head of product development and support Martin Macrae, explained: “Offshore oil and gas assets are complex, adaptive structures with a constant flow of actions being undertaken by international teams.

“The systems which enable these actions are underpinned by asset registers which are represented by physical tags attached to equipment.

“The location of these tags and the ability to visualise data in a certain way, is crucially important.

“This is where AR technology, and specifically Mozenix unique software delivery capability, can solve a myriad of challenges.”

Since Mozenix launched the company has secured a number of contracts with blue-chip clients throughout the UK.

Mr Romilly, the company’s CEO, said: “We’re delighted to be working with R2S on such a highly innovative AR initiative.

“What we’re seeing with new mobile AR apps is very similar to what we witnessed over a decade ago when Apple launched the first iPhone.

“AR technology leverages untapped value by using the smartphone’s camera to create new immersive experiences and solve complex process efficiency challenges.

“It’s a great time for innovative companies such as R2S to be investing in these types of projects, as the rewards for early adopters in certain sectors can be significant.”

Return To Scene counts global giants such as BP and ConocoPhillips as among the clients for its visual asset management and data solutions.

On Tuesday Feb 20 2018 IBM and Unity launched the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store, allowing developers to more easily integrate Watson cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as visual recognition, speech to text, and language classification into their Unity applications.

It also marks another step on the journey to bring augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications to the enterprise.

AR and VR hold promise for business use cases, including employee training programs that teach workers how to perform a dangerous job in a virtual environment, or field work in which employees can hold up their phone or smart glasses to an object to determine if it needs to be fixed.

As AR and VR technologies mature, there is increasing interest coming from the enterprise market for innovative applications in marketing, design, engineering, manufacturing and analysis.

IBM has been exploring enterprise AR and VR applications with clients such as the Immersive Insights demo, which brings AR visualizations to data science tools. In this new partnership, IBM and Unity plan to help drive the development of the AR/VR business market with applications that bring contextual expertise and AI capabilities directly to the employee.

Technology and Digital Transformation continues to shape the service industry. Most of the respondents said, their strategy was ‘mobile first’. Growing emphasis on mobiles and abundance of data is enabling organisations to focus on mobile technology and transformation.

Key take-aways from the report

Breed-solutions are the fad, as opposed to single platform solutions. The idea is to achieve maximum efficiency to embrace digital transformation.

Most respondents said – they’ve been prioritising a mobile first mindset due to the increasing accessibility and growth of mobiles.

To bridge the gap between knowledge and digital transformation – seems to be the quintessential need of the hour for enterprises.

Technology adoption

Among many booming technologies this year, 72% respondents said they’ve adopted or planning to add the ropes of cloud to their business. 30% of the businesses have added or planning to add the ropes of Augmented Reality (AR).

“I was quite surprised to see that technician adoption of new solutions ranked so highly as a challenge. With today’s technology, equipment comes to consumers, employees, and to businesses more and more without a real need to instruct on its use. The perception of complexity is really what holds technicians back. We invest a lot of time and energy into making technology easier to understand, and we deploy tools in the field that are as easy to operate as common applications you can run on IOS, Android, or a Windows device,” says Martin Knook, CEO Gomocha

 Need to evolve digitally

Surprisingly, 42% of the respondents said they initiated/ adopted digitisation and automation of field service activities to reduce costs. 34% of them wanted to go digital to increase transparency and ensure viability as a business.

Digital transformation trends

Technology is ever evolving. There is constant need to adopt to these innovations. The question here though, is how adoptive are businesses? 35% of the respondents said they’re agile enough to adopt an innovation cycle every three years. While, 28% of the enterprises preferred to work with solutions that were scalable and relevant for at least ten years.

Appearition’s AREA member profile can be read here.

A recent article entitled “How to Get a Job in Virtual or Augmented Reality” appeared on Business News Weekly.com this week.  It’s great to see this kind of news item popping up, since the industry is growing so rapidly and many people are searching for information on breaking into the industry or furthering their careers.

The article talks through the following:

• Types of jobs and salaries, including development, software designers, 3D artists, design architects and engineers to create the hardware. System validation engineers and project managers of course who can coordinate and oversee entire development teams.
• Essential background and skills are covered so that professionals and those wanting to enter the industry know what to aim towards.
• How to get started, courses to take and general advice.
• Who’s hiring? Find out which companies, including AREA member NVIDIA and other top XR players in the market.

Cornell University Researcher Huaishu Peng has been wprling o m3D printing, augmented reality and robotics combined.  He is working on a Robotic Modeling Assistant, RoMA, created by Peng and his team.

Peng is interested in the technical aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI), and designs software and hardware systems to enable 3D modeling with interactive experiences, as well as making functional objects using custom fabrication machines.

Peng wrote, “I envision that in the future (1) people will design both the form and the function of everyday objects and (2) a personal fabrication machine will construct not only the 3D appearance, but also the interactivity of its prints.“

The article gives details of all the researchers working on the project.  Details of the abstract are given.  As a designer is using RoMA’s AR CAD editor to draw a new 3D model in the air, a 3D printing robotic arm is building features to augment the model at the same time, in the same design volume.

Then, the partially 3D printed model can act as the designer’s physical point of reference while they continue to add elements to the design.

According to the paper, “To use the RoMA system, a designer wears an Augmented Reality (AR) headset and starts designing inside the print volume using a pair of AR controllers. As soon as a design feature is completed, the RoMA robotic arm prints the new feature onsite, starting in the back half of the design volume. At any time, the designer can bring printed features into the front half of the design volume for use as a physical reference. As she does so, the robot updates its schedule and prints another available part of the model. Once she finishes a design, the designer steps back, allowing the robotic system to take full control of the build platform to finish printing.”

It’s almost like a 3D printing pen, but on a much larger scale, with AR technology and a robotic arm controlling the 3D printing process.

RoMA users are able to, according to the project page, “integrate real-world constraints into a design rapidly, allowing them to create well-proportioned tangible artefacts,” and even extend an object through in-situ fabrication.

There are details of the project design and inclusion of AR technology in the full article.

This post appeared on Medium, by LucyD.

LucyD are admittedly ‘obsessed’ by Augmented Reality.  They say the massive potential for enterprise applications is what sets AR apart from VR.  They then go on to take a look at 3 specific industries where AR is being used:

Construction

Despite the fact that the construction industry utilizes advanced 3D tools to design buildings, most of the time workers still refer to an actual paper blueprint. While we don’t expect paper to go out of fashion any time soon, the fact is that workers lose a massive amount of time because they need to constantly refer to the blueprints.

With AR, it would be possible to refer to the blueprint with no more than a verbal command. This would allow contractors, even the architect, to leave precise notes on a digital blueprint. There would be no need to lug around a hard copy, either.

Car Maintenance

While this application is not strictly limited to car repair, Augmented Reality will make DIY repair tasks as simple as following a tutorial.

These days, if you have a problem with your car, you need to take it to a technician. You leave it there for a few days or weeks and hope that by the time you pick it up, the problem is fixed.

Imagine if you could pop the hood of your car, load the specs for your car and get detailed instructions on how to diagnose and fix whatever was wrong with your vehicle.

Repair shops could also use this technology to hire more mechanics. An increase in mechanics would mean more competition and lower prices across the board, as the barrier to entry into this field would be reduced. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Cooking

Augmented Reality can be used for anything that requires a tutorial — so why not take advantage of the ultimate tutorial-based activity: cooking.

Every dish requires a recipe, but imagine if you received the instructions in real time. A built-in timer would tell you exactly when to flip the burger, a visual sensor would let you know if you’re burning the pancakes, and an olfactory sensor could alert you that your chocolate chip cookies had reached their ideal golden-brown texture.

At the Tokyo Institute of Technology, a team is aspiring to do those things and more. While this tech is still in its infancy, great forward strides in the AR cooking industry can be anticipated in the near future.

That said, all of these potential technologies have yet to fully bloom. At Lucyd, we believe the reason for this is lack of a hardware standard.

Our Lenses and decentralized blockchain ecosystem aims to change all this. Similar to open-source frameworks like Linux, companies will be able to develop applications that solve all these problems and more.

For the AREA’s work on AR functional requirements please see this page.

There have been a high number of articles recently about the use of AR in healthcare and particularly surgery. One such article appears on the BT website which reports on the advantages of Augmented Reality in surgery.

A group from Imperial College London has conducted research involving medical procedures at St Mary’s Hospital using the Microsoft HoloLens. This involved overlaying Computerised Tomography (CT) scans onto patients’ legs so that surgeons could effectively see through the limb during reconstructive surgery.

Each of the five patients (all requiring reconstructive surgery on their legs) underwent a CT scan to map their limb structure, which was used to create 3D images of the leg. These images were run through software created specially to render them for the HoloLens.

Dr Philip Pratt, research fellow in the department of surgery and cancer and lead author of the study, is quoted to have said that they are one of the pioneering teams to successfully use the HoloLens headset in surgery. The research has shown that the technology is beneficial and practical for the medical sector, and the researchers now plan to trial it on a larger range of patients.

The abstract describes how the project will create a platform for enhanced surgical planning by developing a framework capable of displaying a virtual model of the tumour(s) on a patient’s breast.

The type of surgery involved comes with risks; the surgeon has to ensure that the disease will not return but also maintain clean margins. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans help with pre-surgical planning, although it involves the patient being in prone position as opposed to the surgery being in supine position, meaning that mapping the location of the tumour(s) is difficult. However, AR enables the tumour to be visualised in the corresponding anatomical position.

The project involves use of the Microsoft HoloLens, which is useful due to its display resolution and multitude of sensors. There are disadvantages to this technology as it is still under development, but they are compensated for by using existing software and hardware.

In the thesis, there is information about acquiring data from breast mimicking objects, discriminating between photometry-based info, offloading data onto a computer to create a correspondence between MRI data and acquired data, and retrieving processed info that can be used for accurately visualising the tumour.

The abstract mentions that time limitations resulted in an incomplete and unsynchronised system, although the project has established a basis for further research.