The issues being solved by technology related to visibility of suppliers further down the supply chain than tier one and tier two suppliers.  Some supply chains in food manufacture will have up to 20 tiers of suppliers.

In 2014 Good Glass worn by food business operators on site to screen practices and procedures to auditors remotely.

AR smart glasses could also be used for training purposes within the food industry.  There was a deficit of qualified auditors to meet demand which was a major challenges for food and drink firms, however, Eye Succeed (a provider member of the AREA) was developing technology to meet these needs.

Purpose-built to help gas utilities develop new technicians efficiently and effectively, the Index AR application is the second offering available to industry in its emerging SuperApp™ library.

The gas technician AR and eBook application replaces paper-based materials with a rich and highly visual, complete training platform. It features an interactive multimedia eBook paired with an AR learning experience that is loaded on each apprentice’s work tablet for use in both training and in the field.

In addition to rich text, video and photos, the application includes 3D models, AR overlays, animations, and step-by-step navigations that teach company-approved procedures and best practices that are further enhanced with tribal knowledge from the company’s most experienced gas technicians. Important safety and equipment warnings are also built into the application, presented to the worker at just the right step of a given process or equipment visualization.

MidAmerican Energy Company is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, wholly-owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A; BRK.B). Serving some 751,000 natural gas customers in Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota and Nebraska, MidAmerican Energy Company will use the SuperApp to train its Gas Tech Apprentices beginning this year.

The full press release can be read here.

As the future of deploying wearables to the workplace is already becoming a reality, wearables could be integral in everyday working life.

Dr Deirdre O’Shea, a lecturer at the Kemmy School of Business in University of Limerick, stated that wearables could be the key to maintaining a good posture – “[Workplace wearables] can aid in monitoring when employees need to move or change positions, which can help with common musculoskeletal issues as a result of sitting at a desk or computer. It is not a huge leap to think that in the future, wearable technology could be developed to help individuals ensure that they stay within safe levels for lifting or use correct posture.” The requirement for wearable health trackers at work could help keep more people in better health, and could even save lives in the long term. It can also boost staff wellness by addressing issues like fatigue and stress, by encouraging employees to exercise and take regular breaks.

The introduction of wearables will help increase the level of employee productivity, as wearables exponentially increase the ability to monitor their workers. With this level of monetization, employers must be clear with their transparency. They should be ready and willing to be clear about why they want to deploy workplace wearables, particularly if they are mandatory.

With new augmented reality apps, technology and designs, hospitals have more opportunities to offer patients better and more powerful care in the operating room and beyond.  But while augmented reality systems allow users to see and interact with their surroundings, visual enhancement isn’t the only benefit they can provide.

There then follows a roundup of articles from publications such as The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and TechCrunch which are all focused on AR in healthcare giving examples of enterprise usage.

That was a key theme at the Spring 2018 Index AR Retreat for Utilities, an intimate gathering of industry executives and thought leaders who shared success stories about the important role AR is currently playing in their organizations and discussed ways to promote even broader industry adoption.

Featuring hands-on product demonstrations and forums for in-depth dialog, the event was the first of two such retreats now hosted annually by Index AR Solutions, a leading provider of AR applications for enterprise.

Several discussions explored how electrical utilities are facing strong downward pressure on revenues from non-traditional energy generators like solar and wind, along with rising demand for energy efficiency and conservation. Utilities are keen on finding innovative ways to boost operational efficiency to offset any decreases in revenue.

In addition, utilities – like many other industries – are faced with shifting demographics and a large percentage of their workforce approaching retirement. Recruiting, hiring, training, employee retention and knowledge transfer are more important than ever to establishing a quality workforce.

Index AR apps are delivered from a mobile tablet – enabling tribal knowledge and best practices to be shared with younger generations of workers through the modern learning tools they are accustomed to using.

Kevin DeGraw, Vice President of Corporate Operations Oversight at Ameren Corporation (NYSE: AEE), a large U.S. electric and natural gas utility, participated in a discussion during the Index AR retreat about solutions that can help address the pressing human resource challenges utilities face today.

“Index AR, and technologies such as AR/VR, give utilities the opportunity to engage the workforce in a way that they are not otherwise prepared to do, and can help utilities maintain or improve our costs so that we can keep rates affordable for our customers,” said DeGraw.

Together with teaming partner Newport News Shipbuilding (an AREA member), Index AR has developed and deployed more than 90 AR applications to solve enterprise challenges. A number of Index AR applications were demonstrated at the event, including the recently launched LineAssist SuperApp™, which uses AR to improve the safety, capability and productivity of electrical utility linemen in the field.

Index AR Retreats are specifically designed to promote dialog with client and partner attendees – enabling them to share implementation experiences and best practices in a spirit of collaboration. The Index AR Spring Retreat places special focus on utilities, while the Fall Retreat showcases multiple industries.

“Utilities are facing unprecedented top line and bottom line pressure in their core business,” said Scott Sommers, a former energy banker with more than 20 years working with large utilities, now serving as Vice President of Client and Corporate Development at Index AR Solutions. “Our Spring retreat really underscored how Index AR apps are a tangible investment that utilities can make to counter these significant challenges.”

Newport News Shipbuilding’s member profile can be viewed here.

“Augmented reality (AR) hasn’t truly permeated the mainstream consciousness yet, but the technology is swiftly being adopted by global industries. It’ll soon be unsurprising to find a pair of AR glasses strapped to a helmet sitting on the heads of service workers, and RealWear, a company at the forefront on developing these headsets, thinks it’s on the edge of something big.

RealWear has worked to ensure its headsets are both well-designed and easy to use. Think Google Glass, but bulkier and attached to a hardhat or cap. It’s immensely useful technology that can help workers access digital data without using their hands, stream video back to another team member, or receive guidance during training periods.

The latest version of its AR headset is called the RealWear HMT-1Z1, recently unveiled at Augmented World Expo (AWE) in California. It’s billed as the first “intrinsically safe” headset — which in layman’s terms means it’s explosion-proof.  The article goes on to explain how it fits in tight spaces, features voice activation and goes on to discuss the future of Augmented Reality.

The full article appears here.

What exactly is AR and how are companies using it? It’s essentially a mix of virtual reality and the real world: your actual location with images or information superimposed into the picture. AR can overlay maps, steps, data and more. It provides instructions, answers questions and, for example, can compare what a worker is doing to specifications for a task, offering input to perform the work correctly.

The technology is already in use at plenty of worksites. Using Google Glass AR headsets, GE Aviation connects mechanics to specifications: as they use their digital torque wrench, the system tells them immediately when they have the exact fit to seal hoses and fluid lines. In healthcare, surgeons and nurses may wear glasses that display a patient’s vital signs in real time as treatment is being administered. In construction, AR can map out plans against the workspace, allowing workers to see what they should be doing in 3D, rather than having to check against blueprints.

Honeywell says it’s using the world’s “first and only self-contained holographic computer.” A headset that uses Microsoft’s Hololens provides a mixed reality view that gives learners a chance to explore in a combination of the real world and virtual space. “These active learning methods use sight, sound and touch, codifying learning,” Vincent Higgins, director of technology and innovation, Honeywell Connected Plant, told HR Dive in an email.

“We are finding that Honeywell’s Skills Insight Immersive Competency, which uses augmented and virtual reality, really boosts retention rates,” he said. “Technical staff are better prepared to face the challenges of a constantly changing work environment.”

Tapping into the ‘wow’ factor

The tech has certainly caught users’ attention. “AR has started out primarily in new customer-facing applications to bring a ‘wow’ factor to websites or mobile apps,” said Christa Manning, vice president of solution provider research for Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP, in an email. It’s been used to help shoppers imagine how furniture might look in a home or to show airline frequent travelers how to navigate airport terminals, she told HR Dive. But the tech has moved to address the needs of business.

Early adopters telecom, for example, are using AR to support workers in the field who are servicing remote equipment. “With lots of data being generated by the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and devices everywhere throwing off information,” Manning said. “AR can be critical to help human beings process all of this information in real time and in context.”

Retail

Augmented reality is set to transform retail. In particular, the world of fashion retail will see new opportunities for trying on

• clothing
• personal styling like haircuts
• makeup
• jewelry
• men’s suits

MAC cosmetics has already begun testing in-store virtual mirrors allowing customers to test makeup effortlessly, and for free. The mirror, created by cosmetics augmented reality specialists ModiFace, overlays styles of eye makeup on a live video of the subject.

Overcoming the inability to see and feel fabrics and colors before purchase has been a major stumbling block for the retail sector, and customers are reluctant to experiment with new makeup products if they don’t know how they will look against their skin.

Meanwhile retailers are working with augmented reality to achieve similar results, like IKEA’s augmented reality catalogs that allow users to ‘see’ furniture they’re considering buying as it would look in their homes. Amazon recently introduced a similar feature that will soon be available to all its customers.

Social Media

Whatever Facebook offers for free to its users, it’s very clear about what it offers its advertisers—attention and engagement. And as engagement with traditional movie ads falls, Facebook has found a use for Oculus, the VR company it purchased in 2014.

It ran advertisements for the new Jumanji movie as a 360 AR game that rewards players with clips and previews for the film. It’s an innovative marketing technique that shows the way forward for Facebook and other social channels in a world where AR is already becoming more commonplace.

Automotive

The first use of AR in cars is the transition from a dashboard to a heads-up display that shows drivers vital information on the windshield, where they can view it without looking away from the road. It’s a safety feature, but the fact that it’s commonly used in the cockpits of fighter jets will also help it to sell.

But AR could form part of the transition to driverless vehicles. There’s likely to be a transition period in which an increasing number of decisions are made by onboard AI but human drivers still control the car. In that case, AR could help by showing drivers what decisions their robot copilots are making.

“With fully driverless cars expected to be available to regular consumers by 2025,” said Vitaly Ponomarev, Founder of vehicular AR startup WayRay, “AR will be playing an important social role by helping users to adjust to the new reality.”

Education

Google sees a place for AR in education via its Expeditions tool that works by mapping the physical classroom and 3D objects and allowing intuitive interactions with them. Students can use mobile devices to view a miniature Category 5 hurricane or a strand of DNA.

There are even more uses for AR outside of the school classroom—especially in training doctors and medical personnel. Google has competition from its traditional nemesis, Apple, which has made its iOS 11 AR-enabled. Now medical students, and the merely curious, can see inside their own bodies with apps from the App Store.

Entertainment

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of Pokemon Go. The game that swept the world before it was even officially released isn’t the only entertainment application for AR, though. Games played against others using smartphones as handsets, like Father.io, are in beta: your smartphone functions as the handset for a real-life first-person shooter.

Even traditional card-collecting games aren’t immune to AR’s allure. Yu-gi-Oh, the popular card trading and combat game, now has multiple smartphone apps, including one, YGO mini, specifically aimed at bringing real-life Yu-Gi-Oh cards to life. When the HoloLens app becomes available, it will reputedly offer this functionality for all Yu-Gi-Oh cards and deliver an AR Yu-Gi-Oh experience across the whole game.

The future of gaming might be changed in this direction and video games are among the most commercially successful forms of entertainment as well as the one with greatest and most various market penetration.

Fintech

Consumer-facing fintech improvements include apps for helping users find the nearest ATM, or immediately getting information on any house they pass that’s for sale.

But industry fintech changes are set to be the most transformative.

One crucial function of the fintech industry is to analyze financial information and obtain insights from it.

The sheer quantity of information is now beyond the ability of traditional methods. Insights need to be acquired promptly or they’re of reduced value, and while AI has some applications in the field, many of the insights derived from financial data are judgment calls.

That means there’s a need for a human-applicable way of understanding huge volumes of data intuitively and quickly.

CitiBank traders have been testing Microsoft’s HoloLens as an immersive trading environment, hoping to improve traders’ ability to spot trends in a gestalt way.

And CRM leader Salesforce is already using Oculus Rift technology to provide sales and financial data in visible AR form to its users.

Toshiba, which just launched its DynaEdge AR smart glasses in March, approached Atheer about making AiR Enterprise available on the new product. “We believe that this relationship will provide a huge boost for enterprise customers who have been waiting for exactly this kind of Windows 10-based enterprise AR solution from a world-class hardware manufacturer,” says Soulaiman Itani, co-founder and CEO of Atheer.

Meanwhile, Flex has licensed Atheer’s technology for its new Flex AR platform, which was shown at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show. The platform is set to launch this summer and will ship with a 30-day trial of AiR Enterprise.

According to Amar Dhaliwal, Atheer’s senior vice president for sales and marketing, all of this collaborative activity is to ensure that the company’s AR software is largely supported on all devices on the market.

“What we have found is that there is no one piece of AR hardware that is going to be ideal for every use case, even in a moderately complex enterprise organization,” says Dhaliwal. “If there are going to be lots of glasses out there and companies are using more than one type of smart glasses in their business, it’s important for us to be able to have the same single piece of software running across all of these different platforms.”

He adds that there are many options available now because the market is young, but Atheer expects that in a couple years’ time it will be able to zero in on the companies that will become dominant providers.

Dhaliwal says the focus on AR platform ubiquity is part of what sets Atheer apart from competitors and, in an increasingly crowded market, a focus on the interaction approach is also important. “We don’t believe there is one interaction model that is perfect,” says Dhaliwal, pointing to examples such as shop-floor noise interfering with voice commands or tools in hand interfering with gesture suggestion and device touchpads.

These real-world concerns are something that is not always easily tested in a Silicon Valley tech environment, but Atheer recently had the chance to put AiR Enterprise through the paces at this year’s Aerospace Maintenance Competition (AMC) at MRO Americas. American Airlines, which co-sponsored an AR event at the competition with Atheer, approached the AR provider about putting together an event at the competition. Dhaliwal says Atheer jumped at the chance to get its software in front of end users—especially workers with a very low tolerance for any technology that gets in the way of their job.

Read the full article here and see Atheer’s member profile page from the AREA here.

In the near future, light, unobtrusive smart glasses will reliably support deskless work and make technicians more efficient in their tasks. The last few years have seen increased investment in smart glasses technology, with a number of high-profile acquisitions and direct investments by large companies in manufacturers and start-ups, but some challenges still remain.

As seen in this this article by Jay Kim of AREA member APX Labs, form factors, capabilities and price are all continually evolving for the better. This post highlights the five challenges that providers face before their smart glasses are widespread in enterprise. Various providers are solving these problems on their own as industry-wide best practices for how to address these challenges have yet to be developed.

Components Are Pushing the Boundaries

Processors for Augmented Reality-enabling tasks are steadily improving, but matching required capabilities for enterprise with optimal form factors is still a challenge. For example, graphics processors must be small, lightweight and highly power efficient in order to be placed within eyewear frames that remain comfortable to wear. Accelerating real world tracking and fluid rendering of virtual objects requires chips like NVIDIA Tegra X1 or Intel m7, which are just now showing up in the latest high-end smart glasses from companies like Atheer and DAQRI. Combined with eye-tracking capabilities, reliable voice and gesture recognition, these computational requirements add up, both in terms of battery consumption and heat production, which need to be properly and efficiently managed.

A high-resolution front-facing camera is necessary for creating Augmented Reality experiences but not all smart glasses have that functionality. Tilting and shaking also present challenges for both AR experience delivery and video conferencing.

Other areas of improvement remain to be made in battery life, similar to what is happening in the smartphone space. New models specifically designed to industrial specifications are coming to market this year but have yet to be extensively tested in real world settings.

Network Security and Bandwidth

Continuously providing Augmented Reality experiences based on cloud-hosted services and content requires uninterrupted bandwidth and coverage wherever employees with AR devices work. Ensuring reliable WiFi availability in cramped areas of a ship’s steel-plated hull, for example, is a daunting challenge, and we are starting to see more and more solutions adopting robust offline functionality and local storage to fill in the gap.

Both devices and networks may require high security standards in sensitive environments to ensure proprietary information is not misplaced. The shortcomings in security are the same as those faced by existing wearables and smart devices in the market today.

Content for Augmented Reality Experiences

As when content was being produced 25 years ago for the brand new World Wide Web, commonly accepted paradigms for the design of AR experiences to be delivered to smart glasses are non-existent. Authors of AR experiences must experiment and develop their own techniques for ensuring usability of user interfaces and safety.

As with the World Wide Web, standards for user interface design and content first require a greater proliferation of Augmented Reality usage on smart glasses, producing a chicken and egg phenomenon: with poor user experiences, usage remains low. With low demand, experimentation with new designs is slow.

Content for use in Augmented Reality experiences for smart glasses, such as images and 3D models, tends to be authored from scratch. Those companies that have made prior investments in CAD authoring tools have an advantage when they can access and convert existing, industrial CAD models into lightweight, polygonised versions for display in smart glasses. Successful authoring of AR content also requires heavily customized authoring toolchains and workflows and a uniform look and feel for displayed content that is emotive, highly relevant and takes into account safety requirements. 2015 saw a proliferation of providers creating smart-glasses-first content and applications to fully leverage the smart glasses platforms.

Some initiatives such as the OASIS Augmented Reality in Information Products technical committee and the IEEE AR Learning Experience Model (ARLEM) have been formed to address such challenges.

Overall User Experience

In addition to user experience for the human-machine interface, other UX factors for smart glasses are still improving. Cables are frequently required to connect a hands-free display to the networking or content processing hub, or to the battery pack. While these form factors solve many problems such as battery life and device weight, they still leave many yearning for an all-in-one device.

How to best interact naturally with the displayed content is something all manufacturers are trying to solve. The most sophisticated smart glasses are doing away with physical controls altogether in favor of voice, head motion, and gesture interaction. Bulkiness and limited field of view are other complaints that were prominent in the early days of smart glasses, but competition in this space has driven manufacturers to improve vastly on both of those. Narrow Field of View (FOV) limits the amount of information that can be displayed to the user, and the best smart glasses models are now delivering immersive display experiences that address those concerns.

Safety, Privacy and Regulations

Smart glasses present a number of new and unresolved safety challenges. Their sheer novelty also means that few regulations specifically targeting them have been developed.

As seen from this presentation by attorney Brian Wassom, although new regulatory regimes for smart glasses are required, none currently exist. Future conversations about the safety of head-mounted displays in environments such as the enterprise and industrial settings still need to take place.

Some challenges such as obstructed peripheral vision, for example, can pose a safety hazard when the wearer is in motion or in an industrial workspace. Adapting the amount and relevance of information displayed to the user is key to making the wearer safer on the job.

Conclusion

As with other types of wearables, smart glasses represent a novel technology whose development and usage are still evolving. Both business and technological challenges are in the process of being addressed so that smart glasses are generally accepted as routine work tools and become more recognized for their productivity-enhancing features.

Despite these challenges, several smart glasses deployments for enterprise use were announced in 2015 and some predict that 2016 will bring many more deployments as companies look to gain an edge on the competition.

What are your key challenges with smart glasses? Is your organization or smart glasses provider addressing any of these challenges already? Share with us your views in comments below.