Short of time? Listen to the accompanying podcast (~8 minutes) available here.

This is a question with no simple answers. As enterprises contemplate deploying AR solutions, one of the first questions to confront them is a fundamental one: should we build or buy? This AREA editorial explores the factors that may help organizations answer this critical question.

The build-or-buy decision essentially boils down to determining the relative priorities of cost, control, solution availability and time to market.  In traditional solution deployments, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach can be summarised as in the table below.

Consideration for Enterprise Augmented Reality

When it comes to enterprise AR deployment, the build-or-buy deliberations need to take in additional considerations. These may include some or all of the following:

• Implementations on novel or unfamiliar hardware
• Development of advanced computer vision capabilities
• Application development based upon AR toolkits
• Data processing, protection and optimisation (e.g. for 3D models)
• Integration into enterprise business systems
• Development of custom content for new methods of deployment and user interaction
• Customisation of the base solution to meet specific needs

A previous AREA editorial explored how AR should be considered within the scope of a technology strategy. For the purposes of this editorial, we shall omit custom hardware development from the discussion, but rather, focus on the software build-or-buy decision. There may also be wider implications if significant customisations are needed or content must be created by internal or external personnel.

Here’s a typical set of steps leading to the decision-making phase:

1. Identify business use case, perform investment analysis and secure budget.
2. Define weighted requirements for the solution to the identified business problems or opportunities.
3. Identify potential vendors and their commercial solutions.
4. Perform a gap analysis between commercial offerings and solution requirements.
5. Identify whether gaps can be closed with customisation or custom development.
6. Perform cost analysis of internal/external development versus commercial solution.
7. Evaluate options and make strategy decision.

Target use cases are an important factor

It’s important to understand that enterprise AR-based solution needs may vary significantly according to the target use case. For example, the table below provides a view on how aspects of the solution needs vary across four example applications of AR for business use cases:

Such factors may play an important influence in the build-or-buy process. Take the AR-enhanced product demonstrator (sales) use case above, for example. The low levels of integration with business systems and data that this solution requires, coupled with other factors such as time criticality and reduced longevity needs, may make it appropriate to subcontract all software development and content creation to a third party.  

If your use case is unusual, then you may need to consider purchasing an AR platform that allows custom development (whether via drag’n’drop authoring, coding or other mechanisms).

Example checklists

Typical questions to consider when making the build-or-buy decision are as follows:

• Have you identified the business applications (or problems to solved)?
• Have you developed the requirements needed to address the business problem?
• Are there commercial offerings claiming to provide a solution for your use cases?
• Are you confident that the solution meets your functional requirements?
• Would more than one commercial product be needed to provide the solution?
• Are you confident of the solution provider’s financial viability?
• Are there gaps between the commercial solution and your requirements? Are these gaps important and/or able to be closed? Are there other edge cases to be considered?
• Do you have the required skills in-house? Alternatively, are there vendors who can supply the skills within budget?
• What toolkits are available that can help provide the underpinnings of a custom solution?
• Is complete control and ownership of the solution important to your business (for reasons of market differentiation, security or others)?

The following table offer some additional important considerations more specific to an AR-based solution:

Choose wisely – and consult experts

This editorial has explored a number of considerations that are important when seeking to adopt AR in an enterprise setting. Companies may be tempted to develop prototype applications when first investigating AR, perhaps using one or more of the commercially available toolkits. However, there are clearly a number of important aspects to consider in reaching a build-or-buy decision.

It is unlikely that an industrial company will develop an in-house AR application from the ground up, as this requires significant expertise in numerous areas, including computer vision, 3D computer graphics, mobile device management, etc. If your use case is truly unique and there are no commercial products that support the use case, then your only option may be to develop the solution this way.

Far more likely, however, is the decision to purchase a commercial-off-the-shelf solution. As we’ve discussed, and depending upon your target use case, there may be significant requirements on systems integration, data processing, content creation and other forms of customisation required prior to considering a deployable solution.

As discussed above, the decision is often driven by requirements of cost, control and timing. If cost and timing are a higher priority, then a commercial offering is likely the more appropriate solution. If control is most important, then it is perhaps better to pursue internal development or, more likely, contracting the work to a third party.

Ultimately, the decision is yours. However, prior to making that decision, we recommend that you look at the offerings of the AREA solution provider members who will be happy to discuss and hopefully meet your requirements.

AREA member Bill Bernstein of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shares his organization’s early work to improve AR interoperability.  

Today, most industrial Augmented Reality (AR) implementations are based on prototypes built in testbeds designed to determine if some AR components are sufficiently mature to solve real world challenges. Since manufacturing is a mature industry, there are widely accepted principles and best practices. In the real world, however, companies “grow” their factories organically. There’s a vast mixing and matching of domain-specific models (e.g., machining performance models, digital solid models, and user manuals) tightly coupled with domain-agnostic interfaces (e.g., rendering modules, presentation modalities, and, in a few cases, AR engines).   

As a result, after organizations have spent years developing their own one-off installations, integrating AR for visualizing these models is still largely a pipedream. Using standards could ease the challenges of integration, but experience with tying them all together in a practical solution is severely lacking.  

To address the needs of engineers facing an array of different technologies under one roof, standards development organizations, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the Khronos Group, have proposed standard representations, modules, and languages. Since the experts of one standards development organization (SDO) are often isolated from the experts in another domain or SDO when developing their specifications, the results are not easily implemented in the real world where there is a mixture of pre-existing and new standards. The problem of low or poor communications between SDOs during standard development is especially true for domain-agnostic groups (e.g., the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Khronos Group) communicating with domain-heavy groups (e.g., The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the MTConnect Institute, and the Open Platform Communications (OPC) Foundation).  

However, both perspectives – domain-specific thinking (e.g., for manufacturing or field maintenance) and AR-specific and domain-agnostic concerns (e.g., real-world capture, tracking, or scene rendering) – are vital for successfully introducing and producing long term value from AR.  

Smart Manufacturing Environments 

In the case of smart manufacturing systems (SMS), SMS-specific standards (e.g., MTConnect and OPC-Unified Architecture) provide the necessary semantic and syntactic descriptions of concepts, such as information about devices, people, and materials. Figure 1 showcases the current state of an industrial AR prototype with examples of standards to inform processes.  

Figure 1: General workflow for generating industrial AR prototypes. The dotted purple lines signify flows that are currently achieved through significant human labor and expertise.  

From a high-level view, the AR community is focused on two separate efforts: 

• Digitizing real-world information (shown on the left of Figure 1); 
• Rendering and presenting AR scenes to the appropriate visualization modalities (shown on the right of Figure 1).  

To produce successful and meaningful AR experiences, it is vital to connect to domain–specific models with domain-neutral technologies. In the current state of AR development where few or no standards have been implemented by vendors, this task is expert-driven and requires many iterations, human hours, and experience. There are significant opportunities for improvement if these transformations (indicated by the purple dashed lines in Fig. 1) could be automated.   

In the Product Lifecyle Data Exploration and Visualization (PLDEV) project at NIST, we are experimenting with the idea of leveraging standards developed in the two separate worlds: geospatial and smart manufacturing or industry 4.0. One project, shown in Figure 2, integrates both IndoorGML, a standard to support indoor navigation, and CityGML, a much more detailed and expressive standard that can be used for contextually describing objects in buildings, with MTConnect, a standard that semantically defines manufacturing technologies, such as machine tools. All these standards have broad support in their separate communities. Seemingly every day, supporting tools that interface directly with these representations are pushed to public repositories.  

Figure 2: One instance of combining disparate standards for quick AR prototype deployment for situational awareness and indoor navigation in smart manufacturing systems.  

In Figure 2, we show the use of IndoorGML and CityGML in a machine shop that has previously been digitalized according to the MTConnect standard. In doing so, we leverage existing AR visualization tools to render the scene. We then connect to the streaming data from the shop to indicate whether a machine is available (green), unavailable (yellow), or in-use (red). Though this is a simple example, it showcases that when standards are appropriately implemented and deployed, developers can acquire capabilities “for free.” In other words, we can leverage domain-specific and -agnostic tools that are already built to support existing standards, helping realize a more interoperable AR prototyping workflow.   

Future Research Directions 

This project has also demonstrated significant future research opportunities in sensor fusion for more precise geospatial alignment between the digital and real worlds. One example is leveraging onboard sensors from automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and more contextually defined, static geospatial models described using OGC standards IndoorGML and CityGML.   

Moving forward, we will focus on enhancing geospatial representations with additional context.  For example, (1) leveraging such context for AGVs to treat task-specific obstacles (like worktables) differently than disruptive ones (like walls and columns) and (2) helping avoid safety hazards for human operators equipped with wearables by more intelligent rendering of digital objects.  We are currently collaborating with the Measurement Science for Manufacturing Robotics program at NIST to investigate these ideas.  

If successfully integrated, we will be able to demonstrate what we encourage others to practice: adoption of standards for faster and lower cost integrations as well as safer equipment installations and factory environments. Stay tuned for the next episode in this mashup of standards!  

Disclaimer 

No endorsement of any commercial product by NIST is intended.  Commercial materials are identified in this report to facilitate better understanding.  Such identification does not imply endorsement by NIST nor does it imply the materials identified are necessarily the best for the purpose. 

As its website proclaims, new AREA member Masters of Pie offers “the only industry-ready solution that provides heavy-duty immersive collaboration with end-to-end encrypted sharing of real-time data, across all devices, for all the team.” We spoke recently with the London-based company’s co-founder and CEO Karl Maddix to learn more.  

AREA: Tell us how Masters of Pie got started.  

KARL MADDIX: Matthew Ratcliffe and I founded Masters of Pie in 2011. We both have backgrounds in 3D real-time technologies. Matt was working in real time visualization for architecture, whereas I was doing animation and character art for games and short films. We met in 2009 at a London agency that had a contract for what was a very early digital twin prototype project for a water treatment plant. Matt and I made basically a digital twin of the physical site using laserscan data which was plumbed into streamed sensor data from the plant itself that would then be able to be seen and interacted with. It was really ahead of its time and we pioneered a lot of the processes and techniques to make it viable for industry.  

Masters of Pie was spawned from that project. The concept was simply to apply our expertise in the real-time world to the enterprise. We started as a service provider, doing R&D using game engine technology for interactive applications, prototypes, and products. We did things like making interactive CAD portfolios for engineering companies who have big industrial presses that they wanted to interact with. We were also careful not to just build shallow self-contained apps; we always tried to drive them with actual industry data. We were learning how to make “play nice” with real time engines. Masters of Pie did some early showcases for Siemens around interactive data sets and this introduced us to the engineering world and got us exposure among Siemens end users, such as Volkswagen, Ford, and Rolls Royce. That was when we started to identify the big problems that we wanted to tackle with our own products when we made the switch from service to product.  

When the Oculus Rift DK1 appeared on Kickstarter, we immediately saw its value for what we were doing, which was putting big CAD models into 3D real-time engines. Luckily for us, the DK1 arrived a couple of weeks before we were due to go to Germany to meet with Siemens about a mobile-based project. So, just a few weeks after the DK1 was released worldwide, we were in Siemens offices showing them something impressive with it, something they had never seen before. That was a pivotal moment when we saw the excitement generated from that meeting.  

With access to their customers like Volkswagen, we were able to test out ideas for our own product. Before, I’d been able to show them a full-sized car, but it was apparent they had no way of getting their data into that application without a great deal of pain. The VR element was nice and all, but it was the complexity of this data which was stuck in silos that was the real issue. We explored that concept. How does data get from where it is created in a CAD package or in a Product Lifecycle Management system so it can be shared across different teams, efficiently and quickly, while it is still live data and not outdated by two weeks because it was sent offshore to be refractured or reformatted in some way? We wanted to enable the sharing of actual live or real time data among disparate teams.  

That is the core problem statement that Masters of Pie decided to tackle. Our approach to address this challenge was to develop a fully extensible and modular software framework called Radical to integrate deep into where the live data resides. The decision to take this direction was made in 2016, when we turned off the tap of our service work and became a software product company. All of our previous profits were ploughed into building the first generation of our “Radical” platform.  

AREA: That was a leap of faith.  

KARL MADDIX: Yes. We’ve always been like that. Our real motivators are solving big industry problems such as enabling real–time collaboration on large and complex 3D data. Because we also had such great access to industry leaders, such as Rolls Royce, we had very good feedback and indicators that we were on the right track. They told us this was a real problem for them and nobody was even trying to solve it.  

AREA: What made you think that an SDK or software framework was the way to productize what you needed to do?   

KARL MADDIX: One of the early prototypes we made was based on using the open API from a CAD software package and integrating the Radical software ourselves. The result was like having a Radical button within the host software. When you clicked it, it instantly brought the CAD data into our environment. More importantly, it was still bidirectionally linked to the CAD package and so all the associated metadata was available and enabled powerful functionality such as the ability in VR to complete accurate measurement.  

The large manufacturing customers automatically saw the value and wanted to proceed, however would prefer if the software was fully integrated via an established and entrenched technology partner. This feedback was critical in pivoting the business model focus to an indirect sales process versus building out a large direct sales team. Masters of Pie would instead concentrate on the technology as an extensible software framework to license to companies who built the host packages, such as CAD providers, who sell directly to the target end customer. Siemens was the first OEM partner to integrate the software and has been delivering Radical–enabled immersive functionality since 2017 to their installed base.     

 Masters of Pie software is not just about the CAD/PLM market. Any company offering software that generates really complex data or holds complex 3D data is a potential target customer. We built Radical to be flexible enough to work with multiple data types. We are certainly not building it as just a CAD solution. Radical doesn’t “care” what data type is pushed into it. We are just as happy with other formats such as point clouds, MRI scans or any other complex data. Instead, what we are building is what we call a “collaborative thread framework.” The concept is that we will be the connective tissue between multiple pieces of the ecosystem that are starting to bubble up. People will soon want to work freely across factory floors or in the field using AR, VR or mobile devices – however, this is not enabled by any one group. It will be a complex landscape of offerings. But it all starts with getting the live data.  

Masters of Pie secures data access by being integrated to the CAD or PLM packages, but we also want to be integrated to the IIoT platforms, and pull IoT data that you can then surface in our environment, alongside the CAD. We are talking to cloud service providers so we can start looking to connect teams in larger spaces such as factories, and have spatial anchorings support from Microsoft, for example, so you can walk around the factory and know spatially exactly where you are. It’s this concept of, okay, you’ve got 5G coming, you’ve got cloud service providers wanting to stream to multiple devices, viable AR that is going to be coming pretty soon, VR is fairly established. All of these little pieces, we are looking to tie together with our singular platform pushing live data to connected teams. That’s why we call it a collaborative thread. 

 AREA: You make it sound very easy. But hasn’t it been a big problem to pull data from all these different sources and to do it so quickly? What’s your secret?  

KARL MADDIX: I’ll be honest, the easier component of what we do is the technology. We’ve got a very highly skilled team and we are pretty good at what we do. We had a good insight early on, which I think gave us a good head start over the rest of the market. And we’ve got some very established relationships which help with some of these big players. The more difficult part is the business side; for example, securing an OEM agreement, bringing in technology partners, and building strategic partnerships with key industry leaders. We’re talking to people at Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, Ericsson, Vodafone and we’ve just closed a funding round which included Bosch and Williams Advanced Engineering.  

AREA: As we evolve more toward integrating all of these different pieces – Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things – it seems as if you’re in a good spot to be the glue that pulls it all together.   

KARL MADDIX: What Matt and I realized was that there is no real clear killer VR or AR application that is going to change the world yet. How do we mitigate our risk given that? The approach of an extensible software framework product does help us. Our customers don’t necessarily need to know what that killer application is yet. All they need to know is that by adopting our platform, they gain the ability to build products quickly, integrate it into their current portfolio, and be ready as and when these use cases appear. We don’t need to worry about what exact AR device our customer is going to be using in five years’ time. All we need to know is that, in order for that to happen, you need a holistic architectural approach, like Radical, to get the data flowing, pulling people together and connecting these moving parts. Industry needs that infrastructure now. Large Industry software providers, such as Siemens, want to be ready for the next generation of products they are going to be putting out whilst upgrading their existing products so that they can stay connected and relevant. That is basically the value Masters of Pie provides to these software providers – the confidence to enable immersive collaborative products today while ensuring the approach will adapt to meet the challenges of tomorrow. We are providing them with the building blocks to prepare for the next wave of products and features, right now with the Radical software framework.  

AREA: As the current coronavirus pandemic has made very clear, organizations need tools that help disparate, dispersed teams collaborate. How does Radical support that kind of collaboration?  

KARL MADDIX: Yes indeed. Although it is obviously a terrible time for the world right now, it does highlight how unfit for purpose the traditional collaboration infrastructure is within enterprise. Webex and Teams are fine for connecting people in real time but not their data. If there ever was a time to show industry the way forward, then a global pandemic is it, even though I feel very guilty about saying it out loud. I think that once this virus starts to recede and people are going back to work, the first item on the agenda will be how to better prepare for the future should this threat appear again. That for us will be our “golden hour” as there really is not anything else as robust and flexible as Radical out there that can be adopted quickly and used wholesale across disparate software products within a portfolio. Unlike other solutions that may make a lot more noise than we do in the market, we are not vapourware or a shiny proof of concept, we are in-market right now with real product, trusted by industry and delivering value.   

AREA: Tell us why you joined the AREA and what you hope to get from your membership?   

KARL MADDIX: It is more on the technology side. The drive came from Matt Ratcliffe, our co-founder and Chief Product Officer. What we are looking to do is to get more direct access to end customers. We are striving to get better and more accurate, direct feedback from end users. Matt and the team felt that the AREA would be a good way to get our message out there, to start talking about our vision for the collaborative thread as Masters of Pie, and try to get more insight on whether we are doing the right things from the AREA members. 

As organizations everywhere cope with the travel restrictions and work-from-home policies put in place to combat COVID-19, AREA member Augmentir is stepping up to help ensure business continuance and support employee health and safety.  

Augmentir has announced it is offering free use of its Remote Assist tool for the remainder of 2020. Augmentir’s Remote Assist tool provides a remote collaboration and support solution that can be adopted in less than 60 minutes, so that workers, technicians, and customers can get the support they need to do their jobs without compromising health, safety, or productivity.  

To learn more about Augmentir’s Remote Assist tool and how to get started for free, please visit the Augmentir blog page. 

The AREA seeks to receive proposals for a funded research project that will examine barriers to and recommend approaches for using existing enterprise 3D assets in AR experiences delivered to employees. The project will also test the ingestion and use of enterprise 3D assets in a set of suitably limited but representative environments.

Organizations with relevant expertise in the research topic may respond to the invitation on or before 12 PM Eastern Daylight Time on April 1st.

Industry Context for the Research

One major barrier to widespread adoption of
AR in enterprises is that developer toolkits and frameworks currently in use
and engines for AR delivery do not accept or cannot automatically use the most common
existing enterprise 3D assets. For the many organizations with businesses built
around 3D data this is a significant obstacle.

When 3D assets are generated/captured or
designed, they meet requirements of their specific use cases in terms of
complexity, level of detail, and additional related data. These requirements
are independent of AR system requirements.

For use in current AR engines and to be
rendered on AR display devices with limited memory and computing resources, 3D assets
“as designed” (i.e., for purposes other than AR) frequently require some
manipulation. In many cases, simplification of 3D assets using pure geometry-based
algorithms does not produce optimal outcomes. For example, for lightweight use
of 3D models in AR experiences, models need to be tessellated. However, once the
complexity of the model has been reduced, there may be loss of embedded domain information.  Linking such information to the simplified
geometry is another challenge.

In some industries and use cases, direct
manipulation of 3D assets is forbidden or prohibitively expensive. This means
that leveraging those 3D assets already available in the customer organization
for AR-enabled delivery of information or instructions is expensive and, in
many cases, not possible.

The lack of “dynamic” or direct 3D asset
ingestion interfaces or processes drives up total cost of AR introductions,
use/ownership and time (e.g., ROI) in enterprise.

Project Goal

The AREA seeks to provide members with
knowledge and resources that will reduce the cost and time necessary to reuse
existing enterprise 3D assets in their AR authoring, publishing, and delivery
systems.

Fixed Fee Project

The AREA Research Committee budget for this
project is $15,000. Organizations interested in conducting this research for
the fixed fee are invited to submit proposals.

More information

Full information on the project needs, desired outcomes and required components of a winning proposal, including a submission form, can be found here.

If you have any questions concerning this project and the AREA Research Committee, please send an email to the Research Committee.

In accordance with public health directives to reduce the spread of COVID-19, the AREA has made the difficult decision to postpone its 4^th annual AREA Workshop, originally scheduled to take place in Reston at the end of this month. We regret having to make this decision and apologize to all attendees for any inconvenience.

The AREA workshop is one of the key highlights on the AREA calendar, creating an opportunity for enterprise AR experts and companies looking to understand and invest in AR, to discuss, in a collaborative workshop environment, the benefits and challenges of implementing enterprise AR.

The AREA is looking into rescheduling the workshop in an AR/VR environment in the coming months. Please subscribe to the AREA social media channels for further updates.

Enterprise Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR) have made great leaps in assisting frontline workers across industries by delivering information via wearable devices. The challenge for many organizations is how to get beyond one-time gains in productivity and create sustainable value with AR/MR.

Many industry observers believe the key is to combine AR/MR technology with Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-driven visual guidance has the potential to continuously improve work outputs and lead to the exponential productivity gains industrial companies are looking for.

On Wednesday, April 1^st at noon ET (9:00 PT/17:00 UK/18:00 CET) the AREA will host a webinar on the subject led by AREA member and Augmentir CEO and co-founder Russ Fadel. Mr. Fadel will explain how AI-enriched AR/MR experiences enable organizations to:

• Empower frontline workers with personalized and dynamic work instructions to perform at their peak productivity
• Close the skills gap by capturing tribal knowledge from experts and making that knowledge a scalable corporate asset
• Deliver AI-based insights and recommendations based on human worker data to help drive continuous improvement across the entire organization – from operations to training to quality.

This webinar is free, but you must register to attend. Don’t miss this opportunity to discover how organizations are leveraging AI to supercharge their AR/MR initiatives and create sustainable value!

New AREA member SmarTECHS occupies a unique space in the AR ecosystem as a software publisher of connected workspaces for industrials workers and users of industrial equipment. With the stated mission to “bring dignity and meaning to industrial workers”, SmarTECHS provides software for improving the safety, productivity and just-in-time training of industrial workforces.

We spoke with Remy DeVlieghere, SmarTECHS founder and CEO, to learn more about the four-year-old company.

AREA: Prior to founding SmarTECHS, you had a long and successful career in supply chain management and procurement. What inspired you to start a new company in 2016?

DE VLIEGHERE: Over the course of my career with four global enterprises, my teams and I have produced about two billion dollars in economic impact … cost elimination, faster go-to-market, and near elimination of safety incidents and related fines and penalties.

When I started my career, leaving my family’s farm just outside of Paris to pursue a business career, I made myself a promise to learn as much as I could before starting my own business. So in 2016, that time had arrived. I had mastered global supply chains and organization transformation. I also grew tired of the corporate nonsense and oversized egos.

I took stock of my career and what was going on in the world. It was clear to me that the digital transformation wave had only just begun to move through laggard industrial-sectors of manufacturing, energy and power generation, field operations, and supply chain logistics. For the most part I saw a lot of top-down “strategic” attempts to drag mature industries into the 21st century with few successes, lots of damaged careers, and thousands of “zombie” pilots and dead proofs of concepts. Why? Because management consultants and complicit executives made the whole thing too complex, overly focused on advanced technology, and difficult to scale from their poor technology choices.

Then I spotted the opportunity for me: All companies have trouble consuming innovation, especially technology innovators … they’re the worst! What I mean is this: most companies do not have systems, processes, and people for sourcing new innovations and putting them to work in a simple and safe manner. They want to innovate. They recognize the existential threat to innovate. They promised their boards and investors grand innovation initiatives. But, and I say this as a successful transformation leader at four global enterprises, most companies lack the infrastructure, know-how, final metrics, and operational capabilities to innovate.

So I formed SmarTECHS to address that. We call it Innovation Enablement. We target industrial operations. We specialize in the rapid design and deployment of what we call “production trials” … fully operational and ready to scale from 10 uses to 100,000 user in weeks, not years.

AREA: How would you describe SmarTECHS?

DE VLIEGHERE: We are a software publisher. We provide tools and assistance for industrial operations, process consultancies and manufacturers to design and provision what we call connected workspaces to industrial workers and crews.

Unlike 99.9 percent of other software publishers, we specialize in the use of head-mounted computers with a hand-free voice interface in dangerous, noisy and windy industrial environments.

Some people call us a software vendor of Augmented Reality applications. And, sure, at a surface level, our products look like AR. But as soon as you put AR in dangerous, noisy and complex industrial environments, where users must have 100 percent line of sight with no visual obstructions, that eliminates most AR glasses and headsets. Also, safety demands that the hands-free voice interface must deliver 99 percent accuracy in 95 decibel environments, eliminating all speech technology from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft.

In fact, OSHA has prohibited use of most AR glasses and all VR goggles for active use in the field or assembly lines. Our software runs on the only device that certified for use in Zone 1 with ignitable concentrations of flammable gases, vapors or liquids.

So instead, we use the term Assisted Reality and emphasize our heads-up display well below the line of sight.

Also, unlike traditional software publishers, we assist program managers in managing all phases of small-scale innovation lifecycles with an emphasis on the due diligence of getting funded, iteration of same-day product builds, and rapid deployment of production trials.

AREA: So SmarTECHS is really about taking complex technology, making it practical and useful, and guiding clients through the whole process.

DE VLIEGHERE: Exactly. We live by the motto, Make it simpler, but only better. We apply that idea of simpler but better to the three key phases of Innovation Enablement.

We start with a strategic end in mind … a fully operationalized business capability that measurably improves safety, productivity and control of business processes … and work backwards in three phases.

First, we simplify and enable the buying process for program leads in safety, worker training, customer service, process improvement, and digital conversions.

Second, we simplify and enable the often complex and problematic process of delivering Production Trials, taking that from four to 10 months with 80 percent failure rate to one to two months with 95 percent success rate. We solve the pernicious problems of little or no content to use in dangerous industrial environments, weak cybersafety, and the inability to modify applications within minutes or hours instead of weeks or months.

Third, we simplify and enable rapid provisioning of managed workspaces for thousands to tens of thousands of users.

Most otherwise solid prototypes fail to scale because of three root causes: wrong technology, weak cybersafety, and lack of relevant and up-to-date content for use in dangerous industrial environments. We make the entire innovation cycle simpler and better.

AREA: Tell us more about your clients.

DE VLIEGHERE: We target three customer segments. But first a word about clients and customers. Clients typically buy services from firms who spend a lot of money on people who deliver the service. On the other hand, customers buy products that just get jobs done without needing a lot of expensive services to realize the expected value of the product.

Our first targeted segment consists of industrial equipment manufacturers and original product design firms who are transforming themselves into customer-connected enterprises. These customer-connected enterprises, such as Haier or Tesla, exemplify the strategic aims of the $1 trillion now being invested in the “digital transformation” race. We increase the ability of OEMs and OPDs to win in this trillion dollar market.

These OEMs and OPDs take advantage of our “simpler only better” approach to innovation enablement to assist their customers in producing fully supported Production Trials that, upon certification by safety, legal, and IT, will scale across a global enterprise and their supply chains.

Our second targeted segment is consulting organizations who deliver safety, productivity, and training programs and, increasingly, digital transformation platforms for customer-connected enterprises. These consultancies choose us because our “simpler only better” approach to innovation enablement as well as their ability to “dematerialize” otherwise costly labor-intensive revenue streams. They use our products to create and monetize their own digital products, transforming anonymized client and public data into proprietary industry insights and advisory subscriptions. That’s a real game changer.

Our third audience is large regional or global enterprises in heavy industries with lots of mission-critical assets and thousands of technical and trade professionals working in confined and dangerous spaces in two or three shifts a day. Often they need just one or two immediate fixes to an urgent and expensive problem and then scale slowly from that into more organic, just-for-me workspaces.

For example, they may want to add one or more remote experts to a work detail, increasing first-time fix rates by 50 to 80 percent. Or they want to add full high-def video documentation of a job order, speeding the accounts receivable cycle and creating digital media assets for later use in training and troubleshooting.

AREA: Are your clients all over the world?

DE VLIEGHERE: Pretty much. Our business plan called for us to start with local clients, but very quickly clients started taking us to every corner of the world. As a result, we keep adding new international languages to the platform and mileage to our frequent flyer programs. Today we have global clients in manufacturing, aerospace, and military sectors. Even when the client is local, the supply chain is global. Without exception, our clients need the SmarTECHS platform to scale across global networks of suppliers.

AREA: What motivated you to join the AREA?

DE VLIEGHERE: We just transitioned from a R&D stealth mode into full commercialization. We’re humble enough to accept that we have lots to learn about various industry initiatives, emerging technologies, and how industrial enterprises want to buy and harness innovation from a scrappy startup!

Being an AREA member will help us better understand the AR community and perhaps nudge a few in the direction of Assisted Reality for industrial customers. Inside SmarTECHS, we think of the AREA as a “watering hole” or oasis somewhere on the Digital Silk Road, where innovators of all stripes meet and share their road stories.

We expect that technology innovation will continue accelerating and produce a number of fault lines in business foundations. The AREA will help us understand of those developments and perhaps how best to exploit them.

There’s a growing problem affecting multiple industries. Experienced workers are retiring at an alarming rate, while equipment, plants, and infrastructure are increasing in complexity and sophistication. These trends are converging to create a significant shortage of skilled workers. New AREA member Taqtile is addressing this challenge with its Manifest software. Manifest is designed for easy knowledge capture and reuse, enabling non-technical subject-matter experts to capture how to operate and/or repair equipment step-by-step, incorporating audio, video, and other media. Stored in the cloud, that knowledge is then available for less experienced workers to access and follow the step-by-step instructions. We spoke recently with John Mathieu, Taqtile’s European Managing Director.

AREA: Why don’t you start by giving us a quick history of Taqtile?

Mathieu: Taqtile is backed by a team with many years of experience across the industry, including in mobile, apps, etc. The start of Manifest was realizing that there was an entire area of business that had not been touched by digital transformation but could really use digital capabilities to make their jobs faster, safer, and easier. We saw a problem we could fix, and a team that had a passion to make a change. The development of Manifest allows organizations to capture all the knowledge already out there and make it available in a new and sexy way that could be scaled across the entire workforce.

AREA: When you visit the Taqtile website, the first thing that leaps out is this concept of “immediately deployable,” which in the AR world sounds too good to be true. How is that possible?

Mathieu: One of the things we recognized early on is that a lot of the companies and industries that could use this technology don’t have AR/VR programmers or 3D CAD/model experts on staff ready to start creating for the very specific content required. Our goal is to make everyone an expert, so we choose to provide a solution that literally anyone can use, no programming experience required, making it immediately deployable. Additionally, we deploy our solution in the cloud, which allows for the solution to be provisioned, deployed and put to use immediately. We have enabled front line workers to capture everything that they already know by providing an application that literally anyone can pick up and use. As soon as they put on or pick up their Mixed-Reality-capable device, they can begin documenting and capturing the expertise they have right then and there. With Manifest, I’ll do a ten-minute training session on HoloLens, Magic Leap, or even iPad, and within about five minutes, subject matter experts are creating content.

AREA: And once that initial knowledge capture is done, it all gets saved in the cloud. Can you go back and build on that knowledge base iteratively?

Mathieu: Absolutely, and that’s one of the great features of the platform; you don’t need a developer, and no one needs to touch a PC. All the content that is captured is able to be improved upon over time or changed as necessary. They can put on or hold a Mixed Reality-capable device and walk up to a manufacturing device, place a QR code on a piece of paper, scan it on an area of that machine to create a spatial anchor, and then just go. If you have existing training manuals, we do have the ability to use Manifest through our web portal in a copy-and-paste operation. So, if it’s step 1, you would copy and paste the text of step 1 into the text field on the web portal, and when you fire that template up, that text appears holographically. And then you click to the next step and you take some evidence. You might shoot a picture of that part of the machine or shoot a video of your hand manipulating that lever. And then once you’re done, you can go back, open that template you’ve already written, and add a step, or insert additional ancillary media.

AREA: Are there particular vertical markets or industries where you’ve gained the most traction so far?

Mathieu: That’s a really great question. To date, we have gained the most traction in manufacturing, government and defense, and utilities. We’re working to solve a very large problem: over the next five years, up to 30 percent of the workforce is retiring across all industries all over the world. For instance, I was sitting across the table from the managing director a major electric company, and she had calculated that 42 percent of her workforce would be retiring by 2021. If you can’t get people into a utility company to perform those tasks and literally keep the lights on, that’s going to impact an entire economy. So spatial computing solutions are absolutely huge in helping to solve these major skill and personnel gaps.

AREA: Given your title, your focus is Europe. Are you a global company at this point, or are there certain geographies that you’re focused on?

 Mathieu: We’re becoming more global. I’m the Managing Director of Taqtile Europe based in Paris and we have representation in Sydney, Australia that provides coverage for key markets in AsiaPac, and then of course we’re all over North America, which is where our company is headquartered.

 AREA: We’re at the start of a new year. What can people expect from Taqtile over the next 12 months or so?

Mathieu:  Taqtile has a lot of great things coming in 2020. We will be launching a new product that will enable our customers to expand their Manifest production deployments, and further their expert training, maintenance and safety measures. Additionally, we are continuing our work on leveraging the power of spatial computing, so that we can walk into any environment and Manifest will know what machine A is, what machine B is, what machine C is, and be able to leverage the capabilities of this next generation of machines. Taqitle has a lot of great things coming, and we are excited to show them all to you soon.

 AREA: Tell us why you joined the AREA and what you hope to get from being a member.

Mathieu: We’re in an exciting, growing field, with new opportunities opening every day. Being a part of the AREA allows us to dig deep into our industry, and contribute to the research the AREA is developing, as well as market development. With every interaction we have, either with a customer or a competitor, we all get an opportunity to share knowledge in a space that is changing every day. The AREA allows all of us to share best practices, to help educate customers, and to expand the reach of AR in the industry.  We look forward to partnering with the AREA in outreach and market development as the AREA enables us all to benefit from sharing within the community.

Enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) offers countless opportunities to companies looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business. Many enterprises are pursuing Digital Transformation initiatives that focus on delivering technology strategies that drive innovation in support of the overall business goals.

Read on as we discuss the topic of technology strategies and how they relate to embracing enterprise AR in this, our latest AREA editorial. We’ve also created a complimentary handy podcast (>12 mins) for you to listen to on the go.

Robust technology strategies include the following components:

1. Executive overview of strategic objectives

This covers the question: “What are the overall business drivers and how can technology advance them?” Such drivers can be evolutionary goals (e.g., improving profitability of certain activities within the business or reducing operating costs) or more revolutionary, for example, opening new lines of business.  

2. Situational review

The technology strategy review should include a description of the current state of the business, what technologies are being used and how well they are working. The situational review should also offer commentary on the areas of the business (or potential new opportunities) that need to be improved or offer the greatest potential. These can be specific financial objectives (e.g., “reduce costs and improve efficiency within the services business”) or may address more “soft” objectives, such as reducing staff churn and therefore expertise transfer and retention.  

3. Technology assessment and selection

As the strategy development continues, it quickly becomes important to assess which technologies can assist in supporting the business needs. At this phase, it’s important to take an outside-in view and gain perspectives on industry trends, perhaps hiring external experts or engaging with industry affiliations such as the AREA in order to determine the selection of the most appropriate technology.

The AREA can, for example, provide a neutral and independent view on the current technology state-of-the-art, its application to specific use cases and example case studies showing how the technology is being used within various industrial sectors.

4. Strategic planning, resourcing and leadership

Next comes the determination of the implementation plan of the technology strategy. This phase should clearly identify potential vendors, internal staffing requirements and, most importantly, the internal champions and leadership (stakeholders) necessary to ensure alignment and roll out the solutions.

It is often helpful in this section of the strategy definition to include a maturity model, providing an internal roadmap over time of what is typically a growing adoption and leverage of the technologies within the strategy.

5. Deployment

Lastly, the strategy execution – i.e., the rollout – commences. This will often include staff training, systems integration, custom development and more. Many companies will also implement a governance model that ties key performance indicators back to the original goals defined in the strategy.

This framework is typically used to support significant technology overhauls or new implementations, but what does this mean in relationship to adopting enterprise AR technologies?

Depending upon how and where AR is to be used, one or more of the following considerations will arise:

1. Process impacts

Often, the adoption of AR will involve changing how certain business processes are performed. This will involve IT impacts (new IT infrastructure to manage the process) and human impacts – how the “new way of working” is rolled out to the organization.

2. New hardware implications

AR may involve the usage of new hardware technologies (e.g., digital eyewear, wearables) and therefore the IT organization must be involved in actively supporting the needs of this hardware, which, initially, may apply only to a select and small proportion of the workforce.

3. The “content creation to consumption” pipeline

Many AR solutions require the development of new content or may incorporate reuse of existing digital assets. These may include procedural definitions (step-by-step instructions), 3D models (ideally derived from the CAD master models) and more. This data pipeline needs careful planning and architecting to ensure enterprise needs of scalability and cost-control are met.

4. Data and systems integration

Some AR solution deployments harness AR’s unique ability to place digital content directly into the visual context of a user performing a task. As this is a unique selling point of AR, it is important to consider the architectural needs to ensure that data from enterprise business systems, such as PLM, SLM, ERP and IoT data streams, may be presented within the AR application. Ideally, the AR technology should incorporate mechanisms to complement existing technology platforms and tools by ensuring communication and display of information from these systems.

5. Pace of change

As with any new technology domain, the pace of change can be dramatic. A robust technology strategy should be flexible in its definition in order to adapt to later developments or to offerings from new vendors, rather than be locked into a potentially obsolete technology or insolvent vendor.

6. Human factors, safety and security

AR solutions exhibit other factors that should be incorporated into a robust technology strategy, including safety aspects (users are now watching a screen rather than their surroundings and may lose situational awareness), and security (AR devices may be delivering high-value intellectual property that must be secure against malicious acts), amongst others.

Some of these challenges may be familiar to IT executives, while others may be new.

With these points in mind, and from the perspective of determining, planning and implementing a technology strategy, what does this mean to companies wishing to embrace enterprise AR?

Given the nature of the earlier points, and the depths of integration that may be required, one might think that AR needs to be considered only as part of a ground-up technology strategy definition. However, as with many technologies, integration and planning can happen at a later stage.

Mike Campbell, Executive VP, Augmented Reality Products at PTC, comments “Augmented Reality may be new, and its impact may be disruptive, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be woven seamlessly into your existing strategies. AR can plug into and enhance your existing technology stack, improving productivity and communications, helping to modernize training, and ultimately driving more contextual insights for employees.”

Mike makes an important point. Given that AR offers new “windows” into existing data and systems and provides new process methods, it remains important for many businesses that any disruption is a positive one for their business and not a negative one for their existing IT systems infrastructure. Meshing with existing infrastructure is key to enterprise adoption.

Mike Campbell continues: “Leaders in the AR industry work hard to make software and hardware scalable and simple for enterprise implementation. It can be integrated into a technology strategy to enhance the solutions you already have to offer in an efficient and engaging way to visualize information. You can leverage your existing CAD models or IoT data and extend their reach through AR, creating a strong digital thread in your organization and helping your employees access critical digital data in the context of the physical world where they’re doing their work.”

Given the fast pace of change in emerging technologies such as AR, businesses typically prefer not to be locked into the technological minutiae of specific vendors and clearly wish to leverage the investment in applications across multiple domains of their business, where it makes sense to do so.

Mike Campbell puts it this way: “Choosing a cross-platform AR technology that partners with powerful hardware, whether headsets or tablets, can give you more flexibility in how you want to deploy this information across your workforce, enabling you to provide solutions for employees in the field, on the factory floor, and even in the back office.”

AR can be considered a strategic technology initiative in its own right but the real power of AR is unleashed when it complements and supports other technology and business strategies. A common place for AR to really shine is at the intersection of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), the Internet of Things (IoT) and, often, Service Lifecycle Management solutions.

AR is often used as an industrial sales and marketing tool, which typically requires a thin veneer of enterprise systems strategic alignment. However, the greatest value of enterprise AR comes when it is integrated with other technology strategies to be part of a larger and holistic strategic technology arsenal to transform specific business areas.

Commenting on this, Mike Campbell opines: “How exactly you choose to deploy AR will depend on your business needs. If you have existing CAD models, you can build these into AR experiences to offer immersive training, maintenance, or assembly instructions that overlay these models on top of the physical machines with which they correspond.

This can drastically improve your workforce productivity and shorten the time it takes to train someone by offering in-context information where and when it’s needed. If you have IoT data, enabling employees to visualize this data in AR can provide real-time insights into the machines they’re working on, letting them quickly and easily identify problems while on the shop floor.”

In summary, considering how technology strategies are often defined, AR can be treated as revolutionary or evolutionary, enabling businesses to try, assess, learn and expand without disrupting existing IT infrastructure.  

We’ll conclude with one final thought from Mike Campbell: “The question really isn’t ‘how does AR fit into a company’s technology strategy’, but how do you want it to fit. There are countless ways AR can bring value to your business, and AR software and hardware providers are continually improving their technology to make integration powerful and simple.”

That is exactly what we’re supporting at the AREA. We’re helping a growing community of users and vendors of AR to share knowledge and tools along with developing expertise and best practices to ensure that AR adoption continues to grow in 2020 and beyond.

Within the AREA, we have several active committees that are committed to developing and driving best practices. To find out more, please visit thearea.org.