Fink writes, “Brainxchange has consolidated its position at the nexus of the growing enterprise XR ecosystem, with the ability to bring together both augmented reality companies and the large enterprises that are now testing and implementing XR solutions.

For EWTS, Brainxchange focused on securing participation from the end user, and achieved a 75-25 ratio of buyers to sellers. They invited process innovation executives from Fortune 1000 companies from all over the world one at a time to share their experiences implementing XR in their workflows.

Michael Gonzalez, Head of Audience Development at BrainXchange told us when he identifies end users that are seriously considering or actively deploying XR, he will go above and beyond to get them to attend, even if that means calling 47 times over two years. As a result, for the first time at an XR conference, buyers outnumbered sellers. Their use cases were front and center, illustrating why enterprise XR is at an inflection point.

The use cases revealed qualities companies look for when bringing new solutions to their specific business process. While spatial computing had its powerful cameo at the show, mundane tasks like VR training, remote experts (see-what-I-see), and work instructions were the stars, though glamorous they are not. The emerging killer apps were again confirmed to be training and simulation, knowledge capture, remote experts, and work instructions.

All aspects of XR are discussed including platforms and hardware such as head mounted displays.   A number of AR providers who are also AREA members are mentioned in the article – which also features product visuals, new features and information about new releases.

AREA members featured in the article who attended EWTS 2019 and showcased products include:

Upskill, REFLEK’T, Epson, Scope AR, PTC Vuforia, Qualcomm, Vuzix and RealWear, ThirdEye and Lenovo.

To read the full original article click here – Process Innovation Execs Define XR in Dallas.

In this modern age, technology has become so intertwined with our own lives that we no longer notice how embedded it is in our day-to-day activities. Furthermore, it is accepted that in just a few years, many of today’s jobs will not even exist. When it comes to medicine, the situation is no different; each day there is something new going on, and to row against the stream does not seem to be the best way of navigating the waves of technological change.

In 2006, Kasuo Miyake et al published an article entitled “Vein imaging: a new method of near infrared imaging, where a processed image is projected onto the skin for the enhancement of vein treatment,” describing the use of augmented reality (AR) for vein treatment. Since that time, many improvements have arrived and the tool has been incorporated as part of many phlebologists’ daily routine.

When the work was published in 2006, it was proven that AR could identify veins that were invisible to the naked eye and too shallow for ultrasound detection—today, some high frequency US transducers can also identify and measure those veins. The AR devices emit a near infrared light, which is absorbed by the blood and reflected by adjacent tissues. The information is captured, processed and projected onto the skin surface in real time.

Real time imaging is especially useful when performing transdermal laser and CLaCS (Cryo-Laser Cryo-Sclerotherapy). It allows us to observe the vessel’s immediate response, its spasm and the effectiveness—or not—of our laser settings, and helps us to find the best spot for puncture after lasing, even on darker skin. Moreover, the technology allows us to always select the best projection colour for each type of skin, ensuring that we can see the image.

There are a few AR devices available, but the better the equipment, the faster its image processing and lesser the parallax effect (the difference we find between the vein’s real position and the projection we get from the device onto the skin). Nevertheless, there are a few easy tricks for punctures, such as aligning the needle image to the vein image, which help us to overcome this drawback.

Read the full original article here. 

XRHealth offers virtual reality and augmented reality solutions to hospitals, healthcare facilities, and patients and provides an engaging, therapeutic experience that helps alleviate pain, improve motor function, assess cognitive functioning, and encourages overall wellness and health. Both the VRHealth and ARHealth portals offer real-time analytics so that healthcare practitioners could evaluate patient progress and have clear insights on patient data.

“The Allscripts and XRHealth partnership will provide doctors one platform to view all critical patient information,” says Eran Orr, CEO of XRHealth. “All patient health records and data will be in one location so that medical professionals can easily see how therapies are helping their patients and can make necessary adjustments in real-time. The partnership marks the first time, worldwide, that VR/AR apps will be an integral part of an EHR platform.”

“Allscripts is excited about the opportunity to partner with XRHealth. We’re looking forward to bringing their innovative VR and AR applications to market for our clients through the Allscripts Developer Program,” says Tina Joros, Vice President & General Manager Open and Allscripts Practice Financial Platform.

The Allscripts Developer Program (ADP) offers both proprietary and FHIR® enabled APIs to connect third-party applications, devices and other innovative healthcare technologies with Allscripts products. Allscripts has been supporting API integration since 2007 and is enabling over a billion data exchanges each year ­– the largest documented utilization of APIs in healthcare.

“Now we can propose to our clients an innovative solution, dedicated to customers and clients working remotely. XMReality allows us to remotely assist our customers regardless of place and time in an easy manner”, says Marco Maroso, Business Development of Aiuto Tecnologico.

“We are happy to start this cooperation with OA Service, enabling us to combine our skills and offerings to improve digital services among our end users, while at the same time accessing the Italian market”, says Johan Castevall, CEO of XMReality.

Under the initiative, technicians will use RealWear HMT-1 headsets in conjunction with LibreStream Onsight Connect software, allowing them to connect hands-free with Renault Trucks’ technical support for live assistance.

It will also enable them to capture images and videos, playback training videos and refer to manuals.

Derek Leech, service, market and retail development director, said: “Optiview is an exciting step for Renault Trucks, marking a new era where wearable AR (augmented reality) and voice command technology becomes the norm in our workshops and out in the field.

“The headset is the ideal wearable choice for technicians, giving them the support of the technical team right when they need it to speed up diagnosis and repair on complex issues.

“This technology will improve the efficiency of our dealer network and our customer service, resolving issues more swiftly.”

Leech adds: “The possibilities to transform the way we work with this technology are far-reaching, from hands-free inspections and voice activated report writing, to creating live step-by-step instructions.”

Earlier this year Renault Trucks’ managing director Carlos Rodrigues told Commercial Fleet that it will become a driving force in the “electromobility revolution”.

He believes that now is the right time for urban fleets to switch to electric, with vehicles available from 3.1 tonnes to 26 tonnes.

Fink writes: “This one is fairly straightforward.  Instead of solution providers like Upskill, Scope AR, Wikitude, and UbiMAX, developing for one specific device, Qualcomm will help them create solutions for their Snapdragon XR chips, making enterprise solutions much more portable across platforms. On the OEM side, Vuzix, nReal, and RealWear are part of the program.

The Qualcomm XR Enterprise Program allows enterprise solution providers to be part of a global community that offers access to technical support resources, promotional opportunities, co-marketing, joint planning and business development and matchmaking with other members for the collective goal of accelerating the enterprise XR segment to help increase operational efficiencies, worker satisfaction & safety and impact the bottom line. Since Qualcomm is already the common denominator across all head mounted displays (HMDs) including Oculus’ new standalone Quest VR, and enterprise HMDs like HoloLens 2 and Glass Enterprise Edition 2, it makes sense for them to leverage this unique position to support market growth.

Qualcomm promotes virtual collaboration and other applications for its Snapdragon XR technology. “Qualcomm Technologies views the enterprise as a critical segment for growing the overall XR industry and we are committed to furthering adoption by bringing together the best hardware and software solutions providers to meet the respective demands of a business’ function and use cases,” said Brian Vogelsang, senior director of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are excited to be working with companies enabling solutions for the enterprise customer by optimizing performance, productivity and improving accuracy and safety in areas such as field service, maintenance and repair, inspection, assembly, material handling, remote collaboration, data visualization and training.”

“Through the Qualcomm XR Enterprise Program, we’ve received access to hardware prototypes, technology roadmaps, access to new features like eye-tracking and had the opportunity to showcase our technology to enterprise partners,” said Tony Bevilacqua, CEO and founder, Cognitive3D.

The Qualcomm XR Enterprise Program will provide members with Qualcomm Technologies-supported benefits including XR industry insights, connections with end customers, visibility into upcoming Qualcomm Technologies hardware and software product features and the Qualcomm XR Enterprise Program badge to display on their website and promotional material to identify themselves as companies who are helping to drive excellence in quality and adoption of XR in the enterprise.

Companies wishing to participate in the Qualcomm XR Enterprise Program can find more information here.

A New Approach to Workforce Learning

Anglo American developed its Sustainable Mining Plan in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The UN’s Sustainability Goals relating to education are aimed at ensuring equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education – including university – by 2030.

And, by the same date, the UN also seeks to substantially increase the number of youths and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship.

According to Jennifer Rogers, Head of Learning at Anglo American, these exciting goals have led to a broad and innovative new approach to workforce learning. Jennifer leads Learning Strategy across the organisation, and is responsible for design, rollout and continued expansion of the newly-formed Learning Ecosystem, designed to enhance workforce development and further solidify people as Anglo American’s largest strategic advantage.

Last year, for example, this work led to an initial implementation of Atheer’s award-winning AR platform on RealWear HMT-1 headset – at the Anglo American Platinum Rustenburg Base Metals Refinery facility in Rustenburg, South Africa.

The Atheer platform allowed workers at the facility to connect via “See-What-I-See” interactive video calls with colleagues in Australia who were subject matter experts in the on-the-job issues that the team in Rustenburg was tackling.

In addition, Anglo American Platinum team members in Rustenburg (such as  RBMR general manager Fortune Mashimbye, shown right) were able to use the platform to receive and use relevant work instructions right in their field of view on their connected AR headsets without having to leave the work they were doing.

“Using Augmented Reality at Anglo American allows us to address some of the key challenges that are vital to the success of our global Sustainable Mining Plan” said Jennifer Rogers. “It provides our workforce with new, language-independent opportunities to learn and develop new skills that will help them transition to the future of work.”

The Next Phase of AR-Driven Learning

From its initial work with AR in 2018, Ms. Rogers said the company realized that while providing access to remote experts and work instructions was definitely a huge benefit, being able to bring the broad base of the company’s learning content to an “augmented workforce” – and capturing and using the learner’s data to further direct and guide their development – would be even more powerful. And thus began a close working relationship between Atheer, Anglo American and industry-leading learning content development and distribution platform Xyleme.

In 2019, Atheer has worked closely with Anglo American to bring content authored in Xyleme into the Atheer platform for use by global Anglo American workforce. The work undertaken by the three companies represents an example of true innovation in learning – leveraging an award-winning AR platform and a rich, full-featured learning content management system (LCMS), content delivery service (CDS) and learning record store (LRS).

Leslie Farinella, Chief Operating Officer at Xyleme, explains how all of these components work together. “Xyleme and Atheer are partnering to take Anglo American learning content into augmented reality,” she said. “Atheer is able to pass content authored in Xyleme’s Learning Content Management System (LCMS) to Atheer work instructions, where it can be accessed by learners via smart glasses or mobile devices. Atheer can capture experience data collected from learners and use our robust APIs to pass it back to Xyleme’s Learning Record Store (LRS) for easy extraction.”

Atheer CEO Amar Dhaliwal said he is excited by the results of the collaboration between the three companies – and sees an exciting opportunity for companies like Anglo American as they begin to realize the full impact of becoming an Augmented Enterprise. “It is not often that you get to do work as ground-breaking and rewarding as this,” he said. “Not only can we help empower Anglo American’s diverse global workforce, but we get the chance to bring the rich body of learning content authored in Xyleme to frontline workers that have typically not been able to use it unless they pulled away completely from their day-to-day work.”

As information technology remakes the modern factory, forward-looking companies are creating virtual worlds to optimize real-world manufacturing. The rewards include improvements in business value and sustainability that would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago.

Among the most important domains in which data-driven approaches are helping manufacturers boost innovation and performance are innovation and performance are:

1. Digital twin tech and the next gen factory
2. From supply chains to Value networks
3. Cultivating the industry workforce

The article proceeds through each technology in turn and explains how it works.

Digital twins can also guide sustainable manufacturing, letting companies test out different approaches in a virtual environment. That lets them see how they can best eliminate potential waste, whether in inventory, energy use, equipment efficiency or anywhere else.

A digital twin’s most powerful application, however, may be in the design and planning of manufacturing processes and even entire factories. Eric Green, vice president at Dassault Systèmes, cites the case of a company that Dassault Systèmes helped to create a digital model as a starting point for a new plant.

The company realized that it could improve quality and reduce costs by self-manufacturing parts that it had long outsourced. Working with the digital simulacrum, the company simulated different production volumes and flow rates for the parts it wanted to make in-house.

The state-of-the-art plant worked efficiently from day one—the digital twin eliminated the need for a shakedown period. As a bonus, the company now has nearly identical virtual and real environments. This allows managers to more efficiently shift production around various lines.

“They can simulate and optimize for production rates as they grow their business and understand what they need to do before they actually make changes on the factory floor,” says Green. “They’ve now saved a lot of money and become very efficient.”  Read the article in full here.

The example used is via the building of Crossrail.  Crossrail is the new high frequency, high capacity railway for London and the South East in England, UK. When the service opens Crossrail trains will travel from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east via new twin tunnels under central London. It will link Heathrow Airport, the West End, the City of London and Canary Wharf.

Crossrail is set to open by 2021.

Senior Engineer, Ravi Kugananthan, who works for construction giant Laing O’Rourke has traded in his tablet computer to test a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses.

The full article is available via The Times newspaper.

Image credit – Petr MacDiarmid

In the UK, a consortium allocated £1 million—or about $1.31 million—for the development of AR in construction. Meanwhile, researchers from Virginia Tech are designing an augmented reality-based interface for wearable, powered exoskeletons that will aid workers’ performance in the industrial sector.

Yes, AR-assisted exoskeletons are coming soon, but the technology is already disrupting the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry with several use cases.

Making It Easier to Visualize Construction Projects

More and more companies are using Building Information Modeling (BIM) with augmented reality to make 3D blueprints come alive. Uploading a BIM model into their AR software and using a tablet or a pair of AR glasses would allow workers to have full-scale walkthroughs of the plan.

Companies like Daqri and Intellectsoft, for instance, are using wearable technology to render BIM models life-like. Daqri offers its flagship Smart Glasses paired with their Worksense suite of AR applications. Intellectsoft has collaborated with Microsoft to use their tech with the HoloLens.

But AEC teams don’t necessarily have to spend on special hardware to take full advantage of AR. For example, MLM Group, an engineering, environmental, and building control design consultancy, is using WakingApp to showcase their projects beyond the blueprint. The company uses the app to create 3D models of their sites in as little as 30 minutes. Clients and team members can then view the models from MLM’s mobile app and project them on top of the original blueprint.

 “AR technology is providing clients with more control and understanding before the first nail is ever hammered into their construction projects,” said Matan Libis, CEO of WakingApp. “Today, AR capabilities allow consumers to fully visualize their projects so they can make sure the couch fits perfectly in the living room or the right size boiler will be included in the new apartment building. We believe that in the very near future, augmented reality will enable users to create custom features—like beds or light fixtures—that can be custom-made and included in your project.”

Allowing Construction Teams to Plan Adequately

Indeed, designers and architects can use the technology in selecting materials and organizing the layout of an area. In fact, they can even use it to guide builders through the execution of complex designs, saving time and effort in the process.

Meanwhile, when the digital model is overlaid on the actual site, workers get to see the parts of the structure as they are intended to be installed. They can see the ductwork and pipes prior to assembly to get an overview and assess units that need reinforcements or modifications. They can also take measurements with high precision, preventing costly errors.

Augmented reality also allows them to tag objects and real-world equipment with valuable information that everyone else on the team will be able to access. Workers can scan their surroundings and create 3D digital models of equipment for better collaboration.

Improving Workplace Safety

In the US, one in five construction workers suffered fatal injuries in 2017 alone. AR can potentially lower this statistic by giving contractors room for error before they actually start building.

One prototype demonstrates this by allowing workers to see the machinery and expected environment overlaid on an empty site. Such application of augmented reality will help teams prepare and check for safety hazards before work officially starts.

Later on, inspectors can survey the jobsite and compare the real-life structure against the full-scale digital model in real time. They can note any disparities that may be hazardous to worker safety.

The technology also facilitates employee training. New employees can train to use potentially dangerous equipment without the threat of an accident. Blurring the line between theory and practice, augmented reality lets workers learn how to operate machinery faster and more safely.

The Future of Augmented Reality in Construction

By 2029, the construction industry expects to have autonomous machines and Iron Man-like suits to aid workers. Augmented reality is set to be a part of this future. The technology will help builders visualize blueprints, maximize efficiency, and improve workplace safety. We’re already seeing AR in action. And with all the possibilities it brings to such a crucial industry, this tech can only keep growing.