“A lot of the people who were coming to us knew about AR as a hot technology but didn’t really understand how it could help their organizations,” said Brent Hensley, Scope AR’s Director of Marketing. “The first ebook – The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise AR – is focused on that audience; helping someone really early in the buying cycle to get up to speed on what AR is, what it can do, and what to be thinking about when exploring solutions.” Download the ebook here.

The second ebook in the series is Building the Perfect AR Use Case. “It’s for someone who sees how AR can be applicable to their organization,” said Brent. “It discusses how to go about implementing a solution, starting by examining the attributes of a successful use case.” Download it here.

Of course, every AR implementation should be focused on delivering maximum ROI, which is why the series concludes with Quick Guide to AR ROI. “It helps readers understand how to prove the value of their AR projects and secure the investment needed for future AR deployments. It’s available for download here.

Speaking of investments, Scope AR scored $9.7 million in Series A funding earlier this year. “It has really propelled us forward, enabling us to expand our sales team and invest in development,” noted Brent.

It’s also given Scope AR the wherewithal to grow through acquisition. Earlier this month, Scope AR announced its acquisition of WakingApp, an AR technology company based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

“This acquisition gives us access to the expertise of a very talented group of developers,” said Brent. Scope AR now has more than 50 employees and is expanding its geographic coverage farther around the world.

Augmented Reality is rapidly maturing, with a growing focus on stability, security, and other practical considerations. That’s one of the key takeaways from RealWear Connect, an event hosted by AREA member RealWear on December 9 in Amsterdam.

AREA Executive Director Mark Sage attended the event as guest speaker and was impressed with what he heard and saw.

“Like many vendors in the AR ecosystem, RealWear is investing in stability and security,” Mark noted. “They’re putting $80 million into increasing stability and recently named former NSA security expert Patrick Neise as their CISO.”

RealWear also highlighted its Foresight cloud platform, a tool that makes the business of deploying and managing AR programs – configuration, updating devices, app provisioning, and data management – easier.

Other speakers at the event included Ton Van Der Hoeve, innovation analyst from Shell, who shared the oil giant’s experience deploying AR hardware. Jens Mutschall of Deutsche Telecom reviewed his company’s work in creating campus networks for applications such as AR, as well as 5G device development, including Automated Guided Vehicles (AVG).

“Manolis Koutsourelakis of the global industrial gas and engineering firm Linde gave a very informative presentation on how digitalization can improve safety,” said Mark. “Linde’s use of AR helps the company identify hazards, confirm adequate controls are in place, and enable technicians to perform non-routine tasks.”

To Mark Sage, the event showed that enterprise AR is making a real bottom line difference to organizations around the world. All of the companies present highlighted positive ROI benefits (both tangible and intangible) and successful deployment, which can only bode well for the future.

Industry analysts continue to predict that the Augmented Reality (AR) market will exhibit significant growth and will support a transformation of the ways in which many companies run their businesses. However, as with any new technology, early adopters lead the way and many companies have not yet reaped the business benefits promised by AR.

In this AREA editorial, we take a look at some of the reasons why some companies are not yet fully embracing the potential of Augmented Reality and what the AR ecosystem is doing to overcome these concerns.

In short, what are the current barriers to adoption of Augmented Reality?

We break down this topic into a number of subject domains:

• Business barriers
• Use case applicability and deployment
• IT and security
• Human factors
• Content
• Enterprise systems integration

Business barriers

Key to business adoption and success of any new technology is the ability to focus on the business value of a new technology rather than the technology itself. Augmented Reality vendors need to position their offerings in ways that appeal to senior business buyers and decision makers in order to lower the barrier of uncertainty often faced by executives.

The recent publication by AREA member Atheer of a proposed Maturity Model for AR helps companies paint their own vision for a roadmap to AR adoption by building on the work of those who’ve gone before. It is a useful tool to describe the steps required to deploy AR successfully within their businesses. Geof Wheelwright, Director of Marketing Communications at Atheer, comments “The maturity model articulates how to get started and also how to mature enterprise use of AR to the point where it really does provide a competitive advantage. The AR Maturity Model helps organizations understand each of the four distinct stages of AR Maturity – and the clear steps they need to take to move from one stage to the next.”

AREA member Christine Perey of PEREY Research & Consulting adds:

“New technology adoption requires the active support of business managers. In an ideal scenario, the business line managers as well as the senior management are ready to embrace the new technology. However, most AR introductions suffer from one or more of the following shortfalls in management:

• Lack of leadership, either due to lack of confidence in the team or the technology, or, at the other extreme;
• Company leadership that is advocating for technology introductions without full understanding of timing (and perhaps too early or too quickly);
• Imbalances with (or poorly informed) risk analyses and assessments.”

Despite constructing a seemingly sound value proposition for the adoption of AR technology, projects often flounder for a number of reasons. Christine Perey comments:

“Many AR projects encounter financial barriers: either funding is insufficient and/or the resources are not distributed across all the components of a successful AR adoption campaign. There is also a general shortage of information about the costs and components of return on investment (ROI). Finally, AR product and service providers are searching for new and different business models (Data as a Service, Software as a Service, Hardware as a Service) which can be unfamiliar to customers and need to be tested before proven.”

To help companies create a robust assessment of the ROI offered by AR, the AREA is currently trialling an ROI calculator.

However, challenges remain. Christine Perey adds:

“Despite tools to calculate ROI, there continue to be challenges due to lack of clarity in:

• Final costs of AR hardware, services and software licenses;
• Unique or unusual recurring costs which greatly impact the total cost of ownership; or
• Benefits other than time savings and error reduction that are not easily measured in pilot projects.”

Use case applicability and deployment

A previous AREA editorial discussed the issues related to the fact that AR investigations often stall after development and demonstration of a “cool demo,” highlighting the critical importance of ensuring that investigations into AR are firmly grounded within an appropriate use case and application of the technology that makes sense for the investigating company.

An appropriate tool to use for such evaluations is the “Opportunity versus Readiness” map which, following a set of weighted criteria definitions of potential positive business outcomes and the technical, infrastructure, and other business readiness aspects, enables the initial mapping of potential AR applications to gain a business-centric view of where to focus initial investigations.

An example analysis is shown in Figure 1 with the most feasible and impactful applications appearing in the upper right-hand quadrant.

Figure 1. Example ‘Opportunity versus readiness’ mapping

IT and security

As AR often relies upon the delivery of an enterprise’s Intellectual Property (IP) to new devices and systems that are logically and physically outside the corporate firewall, there clearly must be sufficient measures in place to protect this IP. A recent article explores many of the issues related to cybersecurity with AR, pointing out the uneasy position of AR-related innovation presenting new and ill-understood challenges to corporate IT leadership.

To support understanding of these issues, the AREA’s Security Committee is focused on studying security topics within AR and proposing best practices for adoption by vendors and users of the technology.

Human factors

Owing to the inherent nature of AR, involving both the delivery of visual and aural content whilst in some cases capturing information about the users, often coupled with doing a job differently, a number of concerns have been raised and studied.

Privacy protection is a common concern both legally and at a more personal level. As AR-enabled devices typically use computer vision technology with video feeds from the device camera(s), in addition to capturing sounds, user location, etc., it’s easy to see why there are concerns. However, industrial best practices provide a way to mitigate many of these concerns by ensuring users are aware of what is being captured and how that information is used.

Resistance to change caused by the transformation of an existing role to one that harnesses AR has been shown to be partially offset by involving those impacted in the process of technology adoption. Christine Perey comments:

“Attention to the worker/technician attitudes about AR is extremely important in all stages of the enterprise AR project.

Common steps to reduce resistance include working directly with end users in the design of user interfaces and proving use cases, providing incentives for participation and feedback in AR proof of concept projects and trials, and making sure that there is a highly respected tradesperson or technician on board with the AR introduction plan.”

The wearing or carrying of AR-enabled devices has safety implications. They can cause discomfort or reduce situational awareness, amongst other concerns. A recently published report by Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) described some key findings and identified areas for further study. Furthermore, the AREA is actively engaged in supporting discussion of these topics, with a number of members participating in the AREA Human Factors Interest Group.

Content

The ready availability of applicable content to underpin scalable deployment of Augmented Reality apps and experiences is an ongoing challenge. Such content spans 3D models, step-by-step sequences for service and manufacturing processes, and more. A typical first foray into Augmented Reality often involves the manual re-modeling of 3D product models to support the AR experience. However, this manual task has inherent cost and time implications, typically raising management concerns about the applicability of AR to support scalable deployment of business processes.

Moreover, within many companies, there are existing 3D CAD files that offer reuse possibilities if suitable transformation, IP protection and optimization could be harnessed within an automation framework.

David Francis, Chief Marketing Officer at Theorem Solutions comments:

 “Many companies will spend absolutely ages re-crafting their 3D CAD into something usable in a games engine, using a product like 3DS MAX. 

However, in doing so, the connection to the initial design is lost.  Moreover, as the correct geometry isn’t even used, the experience may be “representative” rather than actual.”

So, if you are planning on using 3D content in your XR app then it is probably best to find a solution that can make best use of your existing CAD assets.  A solution that can read the geometry as it was designed and will prevent someone having to spend hours redoing something that the designer already did.”

Enterprise systems integration and interoperability

A compelling feature of Industrial AR is the ability to present pertinent content over the physical world. Depending upon the use case, this data, in principle, can be extracted from IoT, ERP, CRM, PLM, or other business systems. This systems integration task is often perceived as difficult and costly, if indeed possible at all.

Additionally, there should be systems in place to deliver content that is relevant, up-to-date, secure and correct. David Francis agrees that when such delivery systems are not available, “Any downstream changes to 3D CAD models will need to be manually re-modeled, as these are maintained outside of the PLM process.” 

However, there is growing support for such enterprise systems integration by vendors in the AR ecosystem but more is needed.  The AREA Interoperability and Standards Program is promoting a workshop in January 2020  to specifically focus upon AR interoperability requirements with the aim of sharing the outcomes with Standards Development Organizations and AR vendors to help accelerate adoption of standards within the AR community.

Conclusion

The following summarizes the points made in this editorial article:

We hope this AREA article has explained some of the current perceived challenges and ways in which they are being addressed. As with many new technologies, the AR market of solutions is rapidly maturing to address these challenges and working hard to help global industries embrace the value offered by AR to transform many business processes.

For further reading, we invite you to read a report, commissioned by the AREA, which examines some of these objections which pertain specifically to the manufacturing sector. 

The AREA actively promotes discussion in a number of the domains discussed in this article by supporting various AREA committees. These comprise AREA members with expertise in the various topic areas who meet on a regular basis to help move the ecosystem forward.

We thank the contributors for their perspectives and welcome your feedback.

The sixth annual Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit (EWTS) was recently held in Dallas. The event, produced by AREA member Brainxchange, brings together many of the enterprise AR experts, practitioners and evangelists from around the world.

This year, in my role as Executive Director of the AREA, I was excited to be invited to be asked to moderate two panels:

• Leading Utilities & Energy experts discuss how they’re leveraging AR/VR & wearables
• Ask the Providers, leading solution providers answer your most burning questions

The panels were a great success, both were well attended and the panelists offered real insight and know-how.

The Utilities & Energy experts panel included representatives from leading companies, such as Chevron, Southern Nuclear, Ameren, American Electric Power and Duke Energy.

It was great to hear about the different use cases, returns on investment, and challenges the companies and practitioners have overcome to deliver benefits to their organisations.

The second panel closed day 2 and was slightly different from many of the other panels. This time, the focus was on providers (rather than enterprises). The session allowed for the audience to ask questions to a wide range of provider companies: Circuit Stream, HPE, Iristick, Jujotech, Peregrine and Tobii Pro.

Again, it was a very engaging and wide-ranging conversation focusing on what enterprises need to do to support the deployment of AR solutions. It was great to hear from some of the leading providers of AR technology talk about their approach and engagement with large organisations.

My thanks to the Brainxchange team for allowing the AREA to be part of this excellent event!

Since its founding in 2012, AREA member Augumenta has made a name for itself by delivering user-friendly interaction methods that leverage wearable devices. Now the Finland-based company is building on that heritage with a newly-patented technology that lets wearers of smart glasses control industrial machinery (and more) by interacting with a virtual panel called a SmartPanel. We spoke recently with Augumenta CEO Tero Aaltonen to learn more about this promising technology.

AREA:  How would you describe what a virtual panel is and how it can benefit enterprises?

Aaltonen: It’s basically the same kind of panel that we are used to using today, but instead of being hardware-based, now it’s all done using Augmented Reality. So, it’s the same experience but done in a different way.

AREA: So instead of interacting with an industrial machine by turning physical dials and flipping switches, the user sees a virtual control panel through his or her smart glasses and is able to control the industrial machine with gestures. Talk a little bit about the advantages of that.

Aaltonen: There are many. One of the biggest benefits is that it eliminates maintenance costs because we’re only talking about black and white things on a flat surface. So, it doesn’t wear out and it never needs regular maintenance. That can be a significant savings over the lifetime of the panel. In addition, there’s no installation cost. That means we can have not just one of them, but many – as many as we wish. So, if you want to scale that interface across your factory, the price is not a limiting factor. You could have one or 10 or 100 in your factory and the cost is pretty much the same for the customer.

AREA: I would also imagine that, because modern factories change their product lines all the time, the SmartPanel enables them to reconfigure the control panel as needed, enabling them to be much more responsive to change.

Aaltonen: Exactly, and we actually have an easy-to-use design tool that’s accessible via a web browser. So, while it’s easy for us to change the panel, we made it so that the customers themselves can do all the customization without coming back to us. Also, when you have that level of flexibility in the UI it means that you can actually customize the UI by user or user group. So, if you’re the machine operator, you will see the operational. If you’re the maintenance person, it would show you the maintenance controls. It knows who you are in the organization.

 AREA: So, rather than looking at a hardware panel that may have 30 different dials on it for a multitude of different users, each worker sees only those controls that relate to his or her job?

Aaltonen: Yes. We can simplify the design, bringing only the controls that are needed by that specific person. Then of course, with a simpler UI, the risk of human error goes down.

 AREA: Tell us how this fits into the Augumenta business strategy.

Aaltonen: Augmenta started as a computer vision company, developing different types of interaction solutions for industrial customers. In our discussions with existing customers, we discovered there was a big demand for this kind of solution. And when we looked at the marketplace, we saw no one else was doing it, because it’s actually not that easy. There were a lot of algorithms that our in-house research team had to develop.

AREA: Who are the target customers for this solution?

Aaltonen: There are at least two types of customers. One is the company that builds industrial machines. The other one is the company that is operating the machines in the factory. They are buying machines from different vendors and they might want to get this kind of interaction from us so they can manage and control all the different machines. Many of these machines are moving to standard protocols, so it’s not that difficult for us to make a panel that can talk to a variety of machines.

AREA: What do you see as the primary use cases for the SmartPanel?

Aaltonen: One case is a highly-automated factory with few employees whose jobs are not to perform the manufacturing process, but to ensure that the machines keep running and products keep coming out. What happens often in these cases is that when an issue arises somewhere in the production line, the person that needs to fix it might be on the opposite side of the factory. So instead of having to walk across the factory floor to address the issue, they can do it at the nearest SmartPanel.

Another thing that we are seeing now is that these panels are being installed in locations that are environmentally very challenging with very harsh weather condition, or are in a location where there’s a risk that an unauthorized person could walk up to the panel and start using it. Because the SmartPanel is a flat black-and-white surface, it’s not affected by weather or environmental factors. And only people with the smart glasses and software can access it. So even if you have people trespassing, there’s nothing they can do when they get to the panel.

AREA: So, there’s a strong security aspect to it as well. If a company were interested in adopting the SmartPanel, how much time would it take to create a working solution?

Aaltonen: If customers are using standard protocols, we could get things up and running in two to four weeks. If a customer has older machines with more old-fashioned communication protocols, it takes a bit more time.

Recently, AREA members voted to have the organization’s sixth member-funded research project focus on the challenges and opportunities ahead for those who  use Web-based technologies to create, manage and deliver AR experiences in the workplace. The research will include an in-depth study of the W3C IW working group’s activities, and a comparison of benefits and limitations of using Web-based delivery of enterprise AR content versus the existing native application approach.

The AREA request for proposals for the research project provides additional context for the research and details, including the deliverables that members seek:

• a written report containing the results of research and analysis with recommendations and a bibliography of sources and appendix with list of experts who contributed to the research;
• a working demonstration of Web-based AR delivery and presentation for an elementary enterprise use case; and
• a case study or executive summary of the research to be published on the AREA Web site.

Organizations with relevant expertise in the research topic are invited to respond to the request for proposals on or before 12 PM Eastern Daylight Time on September 16, 2019.

New AREA member Arvizio is in the news recently, having just released version 4.0 of its MR Studio platform. The Ottawa-based company is led by CEO Jonathan Reeves, who has founded several successful startups, including Mangrove Systems, Sirocco Systems, and Sahara Networks, as well as serving as an Operating Partner of Bessemer Venture Partners and Chairman of CloudLink.

AREA: Jonathan, you’ve had an impressive track record as a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist. You’ve been involved in a variety of companies and other areas of IT. What motivated you back in 2016 to say, “Now is the right time for me to get into the Mixed Reality business”?

JONATHAN REEVES: That’s a great question.
As you noted, I have started a number of companies over the years. When
considering a new venture, I always tend to look at where the markets are going
and which areas of technology look the most interesting, the most challenging,
or where I think there is an opportunity for innovation. It became apparent to
me and the other founders of Arvizio that Augmented and Mixed Reality
technology were getting close to a point of inflection where the market would
develop quite rapidly in a timeframe that suited us. That is, we are trying to
extrapolate where we think the market will be a couple of years ahead when you
start a technology company. Of course, things change along the way as the
market develops and the dynamics become clear. We felt the combination of
technologies, such as Microsoft HoloLens, the recently introduced Magic Leap and
the evolution of ARCore from Google and ARKit from Apple, indicated a general
movement towards immersive technology and the timing was interesting from an
enterprise perspective. What we didn’t know at the time was just how rapidly 5G
technology was going to enter into the mix. We are finding this to be an
accelerant to the market. So, we’re rather pleased with the way the market is developing.

AREA:
For our readers who are not familiar with Arvizio, can you tell us what
distinguishes your company from its competitors?

JONATHAN REEVES: We believe there are several
key AR challenges for the enterprise, particularly in the area of handling very
large 3D models and point clouds – the type of data that’s often used in
industries such as architecture, engineering, construction, energy, automotive and
so forth. The 3D models that are used in these industries are much larger than
the local rendering capability of most devices. We felt that addressing that
problem would be of great interest – that is, the ability to take full-scale CAD
models, BIM models using tools like Revit, Navisworks or using LiDAR scans, for
example, and then bringing this data into Augmented and Mixed Reality
experiences. We do not believe this has been well served in the market and
something we feel presents a significant point of differentiation for us.

AREA:
Do you plan to continue focusing exclusively on AEC, engineering, energy, and
other large-scale enterprises?

JONATHAN REEVES: That has been our
initial focus, but what we’re finding is there are other industries that also
have similar problems. Specific types of manufacturing companies such as
automotive, shipbuilding, and so forth have similar challenges because they’re also
working with immense models. While we began with a focus in the aforementioned
sectors, we are also finding the technology we’ve developed has relevance across
industries.

AREA:
Without naming any names, can you tell us about some of your customers and what
they’re doing with MR Studio?

JONATHAN REEVES: A large, multinational
top-10 AEC firm uses our platform extensively for visualization experiences in
the presales or project pursuit phase. When a new building is to be visualized
with a customer, they historically worked with Virtual Reality technology. But
the downsides of VR are quite well understood. It’s not suitable for everybody,
some people have motion sickness issues and it tends to be an insular, single
person experience. We believe there are significant benefits for AR and Mixed Reality
in the area of collaboration. They may wish to do a guided tour, as it were, of
a new project, showing a customer or our customer’s customer how it’s going to
appear, overlaid on the real world. We give them the ability to collaborate,
share the experience with multiple users participating in the session, overlay
the models on the real world and bring Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality’s
benefits to the fore. In these scenarios, you may be doing immersive walk-throughs
and design reviews, looking at features before they’re built – or in brownfield
scenarios, overlaying renovations and enhancements onto an existing physical
space. These are a few examples of what our customers are doing with the
platform.

AREA:
It’s impressive how built-out and robust your platform is for a company that’s
only three years old. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the more
significant capabilities you’ve been adding recently and how they benefit
customers?

JONATHAN REEVES: Absolutely. We are in
the process of releasing our 4.0 version of the platform. One of the key features
of that release is hybrid rendering. That’s the ability to split the rendering
between on-device – a HoloLens, Magic Leap or mobile device – and a backend
GPU-based server, where we run our MR Studio Director platform. This
essentially allows you to enter a high-definition mode. For instance, if you’re
looking at a mobile device in a tabletop format in a conference room or onsite
and you want to get a much higher level of detail associated with the model, you
can enter hybrid mode and stream the results to the mobile device from a remote
server. This allows you to get a 50 to 100x increase in the available
resolution of the model that you’re going to render. Imagine you’re doing a
walk-through of a building or visualizing a particular piece of complex machinery
and then, you want a really high level of detail on a particular area. You can now
achieve that in a seamless fashion.

This is actually being tested by a
number of service providers as we speak. There’s a lot of interest in this mode
of operation, running over 5G networks. Service providers such as Verizon,
AT&T and Deutsche Telecom are working with us to test these capabilities
and validate their operation over both existing LTE and future 5G networks.

In this scenario, latency become
important. The ability to render models at high speed and the level of detail
that you can achieve becomes significant. For example, point clouds, as used by
many industries from LiDAR scanners or used in photogrammetry as a source data,
can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of points. Typically, mobile
device processors such as used in HoloLens or Magic Leap, on a tablet or mobile
phone, are only able to render a few million points on the device. There’s an
order of magnitude discrepancy between what can be handled on-device and the
size of the model to be rendered. In this case, we use high-performance GPUs running
on edge compute servers or in the cloud to render the high-resolution model and
then stream that into the mobile device. This is a key new feature that we
showed recently at the Augmented World Expo Show.

AREA:
We spoke with Brian Vogelsang from Qualcomm a few weeks back and he was
pointing out that same idea – that as we look to the future of AR technology,
we will see more development activity devoted to dividing the computing burden
between the device and computers at the network edge, figuring out where the
work can best be done to deliver the best, fastest visualization and experience
for the user.

JONATHAN REEVES: I think it’s an
absolutely critical point and Brian is a good friend of ours. Qualcomm featured
our software running on a combination of their 5G handset reference design and
the glasses from nreal at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few months ago
and we will also be part of their exhibit at the Enterprise Wearables
Technology Summit in September. The ability to bring this kind of enterprise-class
rendering and large model handling to these new 5G equipped headsets is of
particular interest. The 5G work with Qualcomm and telecom providers is an
important development in Augmented and Mixed Reality because this begins to
shape the types of wireless connectivity that the headsets themselves will
provide.

AREA:
What is your sense of the state of Augmented Reality adoption and the pace of
momentum behind it?

JONATHAN REEVES: I think that’s an
interesting question that many in the industry are pondering. Several key
things have happened in the last 12 months. First of all, the widespread
adoption of ARKit and ARCore in mobile handsets has really opened the eyes of
many to the benefits of Augmented Reality. We’re at a pivotal point.

Secondly, AR glasses are going through
generational changes so we think it is important to have a cross-platform
strategy. In discussing our solution with customers, they often tell us they’re
not going to select just one platform and stick with it. It is an evolving
market and we believe it is essential that users have a common or familiar
experience when using a phone, a tablet, a HoloLens, a Magic Leap or new emerging
glasses, like the nreal; this has been an important part of our strategy and we
think this is extremely important for the evolution of the market.

We are also seeing some real changes
there in terms of the tools that vendors like Unity are offering. Their AR Foundation
is particularly helpful because it allows you to build a single application
that can run on both ARKit and ARCore, for example. A lot of effort is spent to
ensure the application we serve can be supported on multiple devices. In
addition to that, we also believe that the arrival of Magic Leap in the market
and the HoloLens 2 represent a new generation of technology with more
capabilities. The spatial mapping is significantly more powerful than before.
And we think these developments put the market at somewhat of a tipping point, where
during the second half of 2019 and into 2020, we will see a rapid acceleration.
I believe this is being demonstrated in the market as we speak.

AREA:
Why did you join the AREA and what do you hope to gain through your membership?

JONATHAN REEVES: We actually had been monitoring the AREA
over the last couple years and watching the evolution of the organization with
interest. We have seen an increasing number of partners that we’re working with
joining the AREA and customers or prospective customers that are also joining. We
felt this was a good time to join. And I must say, we’ve been very excited
about the level of exposure it has already given us and we’re very pleased and
excited to be part of it.

The AREA is currently in the midst of planning its sixth research
project with member voting now underway to choose from the following proposed
topics:

• AR and
  5G for Enterprise
• Web-based
  AR for the Enterprise
• Size and
  Growth of Enterprise AR Market
• Minimum
  Viable AR Glasses Requirements
• AR Cloud
  in the Enterprise
• Security
  Identity and Authentication Management for Shared Wearable AR Displays

The products of all AREA-directed research projects – including
reports, use cases, and case studies – are offered exclusively to AREA members
as one of the benefits of membership in the organization. The AREA also makes
one deliverable from the research available for free to the greater enterprise
AR ecosystem.

If you would like to see your company have the opportunity to help
guide AR research initiatives – and benefit from the results of that research –
please consider becoming a member of the AREA. You can find more information here.

At an AREA-hosted webinar on July 15^th, Dr. Radkowski  shared his latest work on:

• Computer vision capabilities for tracking and scene understanding
• Developing AR visualization and tracking capabilities for manual inspection support; and
• Designing AR/MR visual widgets for AR-assisted training.

The webinar was recorded and is now available for viewing here. Discover more about how different computer vision techniques for tracking and scene understanding can benefit AR-supported tasks.

Understanding this, AREA
member Kognitiv
Spark has produced an eBook to help AR
rookies make those first steps sure and steady. The Ultimate Guide to AR Pilots takes you through the AR pilot process,
step by step – helping you to avoid “pilot purgatory” and execute a scalable AR
pilot.

You’ll get helpful
tips and learn how to:

• Plan
  your pilot
• Pick
  the right use case
• Pick
  the right AR solution
• Build
  end-user buy-in
• Deploy
  the pilot
• Assess
  the outcomes

Download
The Ultimate Guide to AR Pilots to increase
your chances of a successful AR pilot that impacts your bottom line and sets
you ahead of the competition.