The AREA is not affiliated with the producers of market reports however, many headline findings coming out of these reports will be useful for enterprise buyers, investors, researchers and providers alike who may seek to find a suitable supplier, provider, or to monitor trends in the industry.

The Augmented and Virtual Reality in Healthcare Market Report helps industry leaders and business decision makers to make assured investment decisions, develop tactical strategies and improve their businesses.

This report presents the worldwide Augmented and Virtual Reality in Healthcare Market size (value, production and consumption), splits the breakdown (data status 2014-2019 and forecast to 2025), by manufacturers, regions, types and applications.

Manufacturers included in this report include

Google, Microsoft, DAQRI, Psious, Mindmaze, Fristhand Technology, Medical Realities, Atheer, Augmedix, Oculus, CAE Healthcare, Philips, 3D Systems, VirtaMed, HTC< Siemens and Virtually Better.

Organisation Types

On the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), Augmented and Virtual Reality in Healthcare industry share and growth rate for each application, including:

• Hospitals
• Clinics and Surgical Centers
• Research Organizations and Pharma Companies
• Research and Diagnostics Laboratories
• Government and Defense Institutions

It is here that mixed reality, a concept that fuses augmented and virtual reality, can be put to good use by helping workers become hands-free with the processes and focus solely on the package at hand. Workers wear smart glasses that act as a hands-free communication device, connecting people with the processes by displaying real-time digital information in their field of view.

“Mixed reality is considered the next major technology platform. We went from the desktop to the laptop, and to using phones and tablets today. Market studies indicate that in the next decade, smart glasses will be the next big thing in technology,” said Nick Cherukuri, founder and CEO at ThirdEye Gen, a mixed reality hardware and enterprise solutions company.

Ground-level logistics personnel have the need to look down at their hand-held readers and tablets to gather information on the packages to be processed. Cherukuri explained that with mixed reality solutions, all the information required for workers to function could be displayed visually, helping them work faster and more efficiently.

“Roughly 80 percent of the global workforce uses their hands while they work during the day. So being hands-free is incredibly utilitarian. Mixed reality can also be used to provide remote assistance. So when a worker wears smart glasses, a person who is somewhere else can also exactly see what the worker sees. The worker can then get live step-by-step instructions on how to fix a machine under repair,” said Cherukuri.

The ease in relaying information helps businesses save time and money, with Cherukuri pointing out that efficiency rises by about 40 percent in certain situations. “It also improves worker safety and lowers errors that occur during operations,” he said. “The biggest markets for mixed reality right now are industrial warehousing, logistics field services and healthcare.”

ThirdEye Gen has had interactions with logistics giants like DHL, FedEx, Walmart and Amazon, to understand their worker-related warehousing problems. From those discussions, ThirdEye Gen learned that picking error rates were noticeably high. For instance, a worker in a warehouse could mislabel a cart, and thus, the packages in the cart end up being wrongly assigned, causing complications with last-mile delivery.

“With mixed reality smart glasses, workers do not have the need to carry around a manual or a hand-held scanner, and can get instructions just by looking at a package and scanning its QR code. Details like where the package is from, where it needs to be moved, what kind of label should the package have –  all these can be displayed on the glasses,” said Cherukuri.

Information on the efficiency levels of workers, including data on the time they take to handle a package, overall effective time spent and their productivity during the day, can be gathered and sent to management so they can have an eagle-eye view over operations.

Cherukuri explained that though the technology is still not available at a price point that is conducive to smaller businesses today, the advancement in technology will help make the glasses much cheaper in the future. ThirdEye Gen already manufactures one of the smallest and cheapest mixed reality glasses on the market, which Cherukuri said will only get better with time.

“Mixed reality is a new technology, and thus it is important to educate businesses on how it can be quickly and effectively deployed across their operations,” said Cherukuri. “It is essential to convince them to invest in the technology that can really incentivize their business, with a return on investment (ROI) seen within just a month of deployment.”

Find out more about ThirdEye Gen on their AREA member profile.

This is a great recording of a session on how to get started with improving user adoption of augmented reality.  Schlumberger went from “nothing to something almost deployable in less than two weeks with Ubimax and RealWear.”

Key messages from this 18 minute video include:

• Ubimax focuses on the front line worker
• Allows to communicate – access to info they need. Document what they do on the go
• Reading talks through how Schlumberger scales their maintenance operations when they are managing 20 million man hours of maintenance per year
• Maintenance takes place in the field and shop, rigs, etc. digitally connected sensors
• Many maintenance checks at Schlumberger are still done manually – how to sift through all the checks?
• He talks through the use of augmented reality in the industrial environment
• By looking at such use cases other enterprises can get inspiration about what they do, and what is possible
• How can you bring innovation into a company where it gets stuck in the Innovation Department?
• How can you choose a solution and scale it?

The video can be watched on the RealWear Inc YouTube channel.

RealWear Inc member profile page.

The interview starts with a little background on Itani’s background and how the company started and that the name Atheer means Ether in Arabic.

In 2013 the focus on the company shifted from a B2C to a B2B business model. Itani explained that they did a big market study around the end of 2013/beginning of 2014 and identified that the consumer market will take a long time and needs a lot of marketing and time to mature. We identified urgent needs and ROI in the enterprise and more direct access to revenue.

Our customers now use Augmented Reality in almost every aspect of their work. If you take Porsche, for example, they train their technicians for 4.5 years to get a gold qualification. Still, using our system, they were able to reduce the time to fix a car by 40%. This is because giving the right information at the right time, in the field of view of the user, can significantly improve their efficiency.

Additionally, automotive companies allow their customers to see the inspection that the mechanic does and know the possible solutions. That way the customers are more comfortable with the fix.

Challenges to be address by AR are also covered in the interview as well as the role AR is playing in an increasingly tech world.

The full interview is well worth a read here.

Agfa’s Inkjet support group within Europe, NAFTA and LATAM will now have at its disposal Fieldbit’s innovative AR technologies that enable the frontline workforce in remote locations to collaborate with subject matter experts in real time via smart eyeglasses, smartphones, mobile devices, and web browsers. The Fieldbit multi-source collaboration includes a shared “see-what-I see” field of view, step-by-step automated guidance through logical procedures for preventive maintenance, and APIs for augmenting industrial IoT real-time data or real-time data from legacy automation systems.

“Fieldbit is seeking to change the mode of operation in remote field services by creating, capturing, and sharing accumulated organizational knowledge once held only in the minds of a few experts,” said Evyatar Meiron, CEO of Fieldbit. “We are thrilled to be working with Agfa’s inkjet support team and improving on what they already do. We will be able to empower teams on the ground to resolve issues via AR remote assistance thereby reducing the need for technician visits and helping businesses realize substantial savings.”

The Fieldbit platform also enables call centers and technicians to remotely guide their customers, thus avoiding costly on-site visits. Agfa’s Inkjet support team is one of the largest organizations in the digital print and chemicals industry, with 170 employees at its headquarters and field offices around the globe.

Read the full original article here.

Visit Fieldbit’s AREA member profile here.

The promise of mixed reality – which involves the merging of real and virtual worlds through a technological device – has led investors to pour billions into startups like Magic Leap and a major effort from Microsoft to develop their HoloLens product.

While the entertainment and gaming applications for the technology are clear, mixed reality has seen increasing use in industrial and enterprise settings.

Mixed reality glasses startup ThirdEye Gen is betting hard on the technology’s intersection with healthcare and has developed a partnership with handheld ultrasound company Dolphin Medical Imaging to bring their devices into the clinic.

Read the full article here.

The Power of AR for Information Delivery

In truth, technicians should be embracing the rise of augmented reality maintenance and repair with open arms. The very concept sounds like a field technician’s dream: Going on-site and having instant access to technical documents, manuals, and online resources all delivered through a simple, visual interface.

The days of digging through dozens of files on your phone, or bringing heavy technical materials to the site are gone. Modern field service relies on quick information delivery; it relies on technicians knowing what they need to do and how they need to do it—all without needing to make multiple trips from the work site.

This used to be a tall order, but today, modern AR software makes it easy. With the right AR platform and content strategy behind you, service providers can build out their capabilities in some interesting new ways:

Access stored technical documents, manuals, and online resources

Integrate overlays to provide visual support, including high-resolution images, charts, or illustrations

Use smart recognition to identify potential problems or out-of-place elements at a glance, speeding up problem resolution

These features build out a technician’s capabilities and help them problem-solve field issues faster and with less effort.

Simply Maintenance and Repair

Naturally, technicians can use enterprise augmented reality to enhance their service workflows and find solutions more easily than ever before.

Scheduled Maintenance

In terms of AR maintenance, these tools provide valuable consistency for a technician’s assessment. Where typical performance checks used to require significant time spent manually assessing each component, service maintenance augmented reality overlays let technicians identify problems at a glance. They can pull up comparison photos of a perfectly-functioning system and compare them to the client’s machinery, or assess checklists of common problems that tend to pop up during scheduled audits.

Best of all, all of this is done entirely on the technician’s device. The entire maintenance auditing cycle can be incorporated into the AR technology to streamline as many functions as possible. From an efficiency standpoint, technicians couldn’t ask for anything more from an augmented reality machine maintenance solution.

Repairs and Troubleshooting

These benefits also apply to the repair process, from initial diagnosis to resolution. In a perfect world, technicians would be able to diagnose issues correctly every time on the first go. But as we all know, our world isn’t perfect, and misdiagnosing of problems is all too common.

This type of error presents compounding problems over time, particularly when technicians start traveling to and from the work site. Every minute spent in transit is a minute that could be spent on a solution—so why not eliminate the need for transit altogether?

This is where AR comes into play. Even if technicians realize that they need information from HQ, they won’t have to go anywhere to find it. All relevant repair data is available through the AR platform. (This depends, of course, on how well your AR content library is built out!) In turn, this insight helps them understand the issues faster, decreasing error rates, eliminating downtime, and cutting operational costs as much as possible.

Streamline Service Delivery and Maintenance

The applications of AR for field service technicians are just getting started. As time goes on, we expect to see these use cases build out further to incorporate even more accessibility, including entirely virtual consultations delivered via app, and even self-service options that let clients troubleshoot on their own.

But regardless of how it’s used, it’s clear that AR-enabled field service expands a provider’s capabilities beyond what most companies currently provide. And from a competitive standpoint, this can translate to big boosts in overall efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Read Fieldbit’s member profile here.

David Francis writes:

It is incredibly encouraging how many companies are now embarking on an XR (eXtended Reality) journey. Many have managed to find some internal investment and commitment to do a Proof of Concept (PoC) project to start to understand how these emerging technologies can improve their business.

Whilst some engage with outside help, others decide to embark on the journey themselves. Both are great, in that, the only way to understand and prove that the technology has significant time saving and cost benefits, is to actually do it!

But, by going it alone you may well be introducing technical debt into your organisation. Technical debt describes what happens when software development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which will later need to be re-worked. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing a quick delivery over a perfect solution.

Technical debt is a phrase originally coined by software developer, Ward Cunningham (@WardCunningham). He first used the metaphor to explain to non-technical stakeholders at WyCash why resources needed to be budgeted for refactoring.

Ward said “With borrowed money you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money, you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.”

Ward didn’t realize at the time, but he had just created a new buzzword in the software community.

As Ward suggested, if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) technical debt is required to move projects forward. But, you can encounter problems down the road.

For example, by creating a PoC in-house, you rely on the skills of your staff members. If the business restructures, you may find that these resources are no longer available to you; so, who will continue their work, and move it on to the next phase, if they are no longer there?

There are many reasons why you could find yourself in the situation of creating this technical debt. This technology is new, so it is quite possible that there was insufficient up-front definition; often requirements are still being defined during design or development. Agile software development is all about iterations and rapid delivery but often this means that the solution has to be reworked later.

Business pressures, where there is a concern that not doing something will lead to a competitive disadvantage, leads to something being released sooner, before all of the necessary changes are complete. This builds up technical debt comprising those uncompleted changes.

Or, there could be a lack of process or understanding of the desired outcome; where businesses are blind to the concept of technical debt and make decisions without considering the implications.

By reading this, you may now be put off from starting your XR journey; but don’t be. Just make sure that you understand the implications of your decisions before you start.

Some issues that we have encountered with our clients include, not thinking about what will happen when your CAD vendor no longer supports the version of software that you are using. Your processes are absolutely dependent on your 3D CAD and your ability to integrate it in VR/MR but your working solution is now end-of-life.

A solution like our Visualization Pipeline would ensure that this does not happen. At Theorem we work with all of the major CAD vendors to ensure that our software works with the latest versions. This means that getting your 3D content into your visualization software remains consistent. You can upgrade, or even change your CAD supplier, and your path to visualization remains intact.

Another issue that we have encountered is around the hardware. In the last couple of months there must have been 5, 6, or maybe more product announcements from various companies showing the latest head mounted display technologies. How do you know which is the right one to choose? It is really important to have a device agnostic approach. Often companies look like they have the best device which is going to revolutionize the market- look at Meta 2, or Star VR. Both of these no longer exist. By taking an agnostic approach, rather than pinning all your hopes on one device can save you from the headache of being stuck with obsolete and unsupported hardware, that may also still be “brand new”…

Read full original article on the Theorem Blog.

Read Theorem Solutions AREA member profile.

Fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and computing speed, businesses — from auto to aerospace to retail — are changing the fundamental building blocks of how they operate.

By 2030, machine learning could contribute nearly $16 trillion to the global economy, research shows.

For Mrosik and Siemens, the revolution is well underway. Manufacturing plants increasingly rely on smart machines and interconnected devices to build products cheaper, faster and more efficiently. In August of 2018, Siemens unveiled a new strategy, Vision 2020+, an ambitious plan to revamp the 170-year-old behemoth into a shinier, new, AI-age version of itself, shedding older lines of businesses while investing in technology it believes will allow it to dominate in the digital era.

To see the fourth industrial revolution in action, take a trip to Siemens’ factory in Amberg, Germany. Here, in a facility that has been in production since 1989 — before most people knew  the World Wide Web even existed — the transformation from analog manufacturing to analytics-fueled digital production is unfolding in real time.

The Amberg factory in Bavaria has a particularly complex job — the 100,000-square-foot facility manufactures more than 1,200 different products. This means its production line must change configurations approximately 350 times a day, says Mrosik. In the past, this was a laborious process that required workers to spend time making changes to equipment and machinery by hand.

Now, before anything even hits the line, a computer model creates a digital version of the products, the production line and the manufacturing process itself, helping to streamline and speed up the time it takes to set up new configurations.   Digital twins are explained.

By running a digital dress rehearsal of, say, an engine’s assembly, the company can see where there might be bottlenecks, inefficiencies or unexpected needs, whether for additional materials or safety measures.

The Amberg factory is a microcosm of a much bigger story. What’s happening here is happening across manufacturing floors around the world using digital twins to accelerate product design and manufacturing. Automakers, for example, once had to create physical prototypes to design and test new models; now they can create computerized versions that look and behave like real cars.

Read more in the full article.

Montgomerie writes “It’s a thrill to see how rapidly AR and other technologies are evolving. And it’s just as gratifying to see just how these knowledge-sharing technologies are meeting the business needs in the marketplace.

Just a few years ago, enterprise AR was an emerging technology. But one thing became crystal-clear at AWE this year: AR for the enterprise is no longer a novelty. It’s not just a wild idea to test out in a sandbox. Companies are using AR to solve real business problems. They’re giving their workforce access to critical, specialized knowledge when and where they need it. After seeing impressive use cases, and talking to the enterprise innovators that now use AR for real-world applications — I can safely say: the emerging-tech phase is in the rearview mirror.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking with executives ready to test AR in parts of their business. They’re typically optimistic, but cautious: I get it — but where do I start, and how do I get my team on board?

There are definitely use cases that AR is better suited for than others in an enterprise setting.  In order to ensure you’re choosing the right use case for your organization, here are three mistakes to avoid as you prepare your business for AR adoption:

1) Don’t plan to rewire your entire business. You can’t expect AR to replace a process across your global operations overnight. Start smart. Find a discreet project where you can address a real-world business problem. Ensure it’s a process that can be enhanced by real-time knowledge transfer. And above all, ensure it’s a use case where you can measure and share quantifiable results.

What scenarios might be a good candidate for your business’ first use case? Be sure to consider workflows and teams that would benefit from augmented knowledge like step-by-step instructions, contextual digital overlays, and even live video support from a remote expert. For instance, imagine how impactful on-demand expertise – by way of real-time remote assistance or pre-built guided instructions – could be for a field service team or remote workers managing highly-specialized manufacturing tasks.

2) Avoid complexity and embrace efficiency. From the outset, it’s important to understand where AR will most benefit the people and processes that are the lifeblood of your business. You need to make sure it brings instant expertise and context to the task at-hand. You don’t want to add another layer of process; you want to ensure workers can access knowledge from subject matter experts or resources, wherever they are and whenever they need them.

Some questions to ask along the way:

• What direction or communications do your remote workers need most while they are in their workstream?
• Where can real-time expertise help them complete tasks most efficiently and effectively?
• What tasks in physical space — such as locating repair points, modeling, assembly or QA — could benefit from real-time guidance or visual, intuitive instructions?
• What situations might benefit from live assistance or access to a support recording of the same scenario, versus specialized standalone training?
• What do your senior-staff subject matter experts know that new hires don’t — and can AR-enhanced support, communications or replays help bridge the gap?

3) Don’t lose sight of business realities. At the end of the day, if your first AR use case fails to provide ROI, you might not get a chance to kick off a second one. Ensure you’ve allocated ample budget to complete a project successfully. But don’t burn budget on proprietary hardware or a closed software platform. You likely can build out an initiative with an agnostic AR platform that extends across devices and operating systems your team already uses. Creating a smart budget will help you more quickly achieve ROI.

Beyond planning for cost, you’ll need to navigate another business reality: you’re rarely in it alone. Your AR project will need buy-in from two additional critical sets of stakeholders: your leadership and your IT department. An advocate inside the business can help make the case to leadership for the investment, and ensure they see the hard-cost savings potential in the unprecedented levels of knowledge sharing that AR allows.

Just as critically, however, IT needs to be on board, as early as possible. IT can help you clear hurdles around security, governance or other compliance protocols, like limited-access to intellectual property you might need to share over an AR platform. Approach your AR use case with IT as a full deployment partner, so you’re integrated with the existing systems and infrastructure that knowledge and communications already flow through.

From conversations with business leaders, I know it can seem daunting to get an AR project deployed. With the right use case, you can unlock expertise, share knowledge and add value well beyond the objectives of your initial project. Ready to get started? Download our free eBook, “Building the Perfect AR Use Case” for a step-by-step guide to launching an enterprise AR initiative.