As discussed in Rio Tinto’s 2020 Annual Report, Rio Tinto has been focused on working safer and smarter and as part of that effort they increased their use of drones and mine pit cameras and introduced video headsets (including smart glasses) to conduct visual inspections of tailings facilities and equipment while complying with travel restrictions and physical distance requirements. At the Oyu Tolgoi underground project, Rio Tinto used Vuzix Smart Glasses to enable technical experts from all over the world to work with local teams on the project site.

“Vuzix Smart Glasses usage continues to expand across an ever-widening array of industry verticals,” said Paul Travers, Vuzix President and Chief Executive Officer. “Companies like Rio Tinto, which is a global leader in its field, continue to provide validation of the value and effectiveness of our products in real world situations.”

Read Vuzix AREA member profile

Read original press release on Vuzix website.

Theorem’s ARR solution delivers streamed data from the ARR server to the HoloLens 2, enabling users to add locally rendered content, by combining streamed data with existing managed assets. This is all facilitated by the seamless integration between Theorem’s Visualization Pipeline and the ARR Server, providing an easy to use mechanism to deliver content.

Theorem CTO Mark Stowe explains “With ARR, the constraints of large data sets and high-quality rendering are swept away, enabling Engineers using Theorem’s collaborative HoloLens 2 solutions for Visualization, Design Review and Factory Layout to further increase their productivity.”

Theorem’s ARR focus is driven by the needs of our Engineering and Manufacturing users, whose focus is on improving their product quality and delivering manufacturing improvements by using HoloLens and ARR.

Using Microsoft HoloLens 2 device to visualize data collaboratively, in context, and at scale in the real world is a game changer for those who currently experience their 3D data from the confines of a 2D screen.

HoloLens Mixed Reality has delivered unique productivity benefits to Engineering and Manufacturing businesses, and Theorem are proud to have delivered HoloLens solutions for those industries from the outset in 2016.

The Microsoft Mixed Reality Partner Program (MRPP) enables its members to build and deploy breakthrough industry solutions and identifies those who have achieved a high level of competency on the Windows Mixed Reality platform.  As a member of the Partner Program, Theorem have been given early access to Microsoft’s ARR software to enable us to deliver usable product at the point of release.

ARR is the obvious “next step” for existing XR users and anyone that has the requirement to deploy a Mixed Reality (MR) enabled use case.

We firmly believe that in the future remote rendering will be the default choice for XR Experiences.

For more information visit https://www.theorem.com/theorem-xr/microsoft-azure-remote-rendering

Press release 

Read Theorem Solution’s AREA member profile.

Upskill’s digital workflow solutions support workers especially in industrial manufacturing, inspection, and audit use cases through real-time interfaces with smart glasses and handheld mobile devices. With Upskill’s strong presence on the North American continent, an engineering hub in Austin, TX, and reputable blue-chip customers such as The Boeing Company, Merck KGaA and American Bureau of Shipping, TeamViewer strengthens its position as the number one global player in providing industry-specific AR solutions. The company had started to strategically invest in that space in 2020 with the successful acquisition of European wearable software leader Ubimax, serving global champions like DHL, Siemens and Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company.

Oliver Steil, CEO of TeamViewer, said: “Joining forces with Upskill is expanding our footprint in the space of vertical augmented reality solutions in our largest market, the US. I am happy to welcome the Upskill team that adds significant technical and solution delivery know-how to our US organization. Our joint AR teams now represent the world’s most experienced workforce in deploying wearable computing technology to the shop floor. By acquiring Upskill, we strengthen our capabilities in enabling digital transformation across all verticals and parts of the value-chain as the company is focusing on complementary use cases and industries such as aerospace, pharma & life sciences, insurance & claims management and retail. The enterprise AR market is huge and growing rapidly, and we are perfectly positioned to tap that potential.”

Brian Ballard, CEO of Upskill, said: “We are very excited to join TeamViewer and to further shape the future of work. Combining with their strong sales and marketing capabilities and integrating with their AR and IoT solutions, we will reinforce our mission to upskill frontline workers and to enhance industrial processes through technology. Our existing customers will benefit from an accelerated product development roadmap, global reach, and additional solutions and features within the TeamViewer portfolio.”

Upskill, founded in 2010, has two locations in the United States in Tyson’s Corner, VA and Austin, TX. TeamViewer plans to keep and grow these offices to expand its presence within the US and to build on Upskill’s important partnerships within the US tech ecosystem.

The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.

Read Upskill’s AREA profile here.

Read Press Release here 

TeamViewer website 

This collaboration offers members of both Khronos and AREA, as well as the enterprise AR community at large, an opportunity to contribute to industry-wide discussions that will have positive impacts on the future of AR-enabled user and customer experiences.

During an AREA-hosted webinar beginning at 11 AM Eastern Wednesday 3rd March 2021, Khronos members will present initiatives on which they are working to reduce barriers to adoption of AR for enterprise and 3D Commerce.

To join, please visit: https://thearea.org/event/khronos-ar-3d-commerce-wider-industry-impact/

All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for new interoperability standards to accelerate market growth and reduce development costs in embedded markets using vision and sensor processing and associated acceleration. If the Exploratory Group reaches significant consensus then Khronos and EMVA will work to initiate the proposed standardization projects at the appropriate organizations.

All sensor and camera manufacturers, silicon vendors, and software developers working on vision and sensor processing are invited to participate in this initiative. More details and instructions for joining the group are here.

The Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group has been created in response to industry requests. Increasingly, camera sensors are being tightly integrated with image, vision and inferencing accelerators in self-contained systems. Innovation and efficiency in the embedded vision market is becoming constrained by the lack of open cross-vendor camera control API standards to reduce development and integration costs of multiple advanced sensors and cameras. A consistent set of interoperability standards and guidelines for embedded cameras and sensors could streamline deployment by manufacturers and system integrators by enabling control of a wide range of camera sensors, depth sensors, camera arrays and ISP hardware to generate sophisticated image streams for downstream processing by diverse accelerators.

This Exploratory Group will use Khronos’ proven framework for new initiatives in collaboration with the EMVA. Any companies, universities, consortiums, open-source participants, and industry experts who are willing to sign an NDA are welcome to join, at no cost. All participants will have an equal voice in exploring industry needs for, and benefits of, creating a consensus to develop a Scope of Work (SOW) document describing the objectives and high-level direction of standardization initiatives of value to the industry. The Exploratory Group is expected to meet online over a period of several months starting on March 25, 2021.

All Exploratory Group discussions will be covered by a simple project NDA to encourage open discussions. The Group is open to all proposals and relevant topics but will not discuss detailed technical design contributions to protect participants intellectual property (IP). If a SOW is agreed, Khronos and EMVA will work to initiate the standardization work at the most suitable host organizations or open source projects, using those organizations’ normal collaborative agreements and IP frameworks.

Many industry leaders have indicated an interest in joining the Exploratory Group, including ALL3D, Almalence, AMD, Apertus, AREA, Arm, Cadence, Codeplay, Collabora, EA, Facebook, Google, Holochip, HP, Huawei, LunarG, Mobica, NVIDIA, Oculus, OPPO, Qualcomm, RedHat, Texas Instruments, Ultraleap, and Valve from Khronos; as well as EMVA members and machine vision players such as Allied Vision, Basler AG, Baumer, MVTec, and Stemmer Imaging AG.

“Judging by the significant industry interest, the time seems right to organize an effort around identifying and aligning on the need for interoperability APIs for embedded cameras and sensors. This is a topic that is very relevant to Khronos as our acceleration APIs, such as OpenCL™, SYCL™, and OpenVX™ are often used to accelerate sophisticated sensor stream processing,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos Group president. “Our work is also very complementary to EMVA, and we are delighted that the two organizations are working together to bring a meaningful quorum from diverse parts of the industry into this cooperative exploratory process.”

”We are delighted to work with Khronos on this initiative to commonly understand the industry needs for the future of embedded vision,” said Dr. Chris Yates, EMVA president. “Both the EMVA and the Khronos group have a well-established history of standardization developments which enable industry to develop new products more simply, whilst ensuring friction is reduced in the market. This Exploratory Group is an excellent approach to understanding broader industry needs and will bring together many companies and views in an open forum. We look forward to working closely with the Khronos Group and welcoming all new and existing participants to this important initiative for the vision community.”

Supportive Quotes from the Industry

“Embedded vision is a natural progression from full-sized PC-based vision systems to systems on a chip and is critically important to the future of the vision industry. The industry has seen great benefits from digital interface/interoperability standards such as GigE Vison and USB3 Vision in expanding markets, reducing costs, and simplifying technology application. It makes great sense to continue these standardization concepts at the embedded level,” shared Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), parent association to AIA – Advancing Vision+Imaging.

“Lack of API standards for advanced use of embedded cameras and sensors is an impediment to industry growth, collaboration and innovation. Enterprise AR customers and systems integrators/value added providers will benefit from greater clarity, open interfaces between modular systems and innovation in the component provider ecosystem. Standards for camera and sensor control will increase opportunities for powerful new combinations of sensor and AR compute resources, integration with existing IT, and lower cost and complexity of future solutions,” said Christine Perey, interoperability and standards program leader for the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA).

“The establishment of this Exploratory Group provides a great opportunity to connect with the Khronos Group, EMVA and industry partners to ensure that together we can create the best experience for embedded cameras on all Linux platforms,” explained Laurent Pinchart, lead architect of libcamera^®. “The Linux camera community has seen a need for standardisation and interoperability in the embedded camera space for more than a decade. We launched the libcamera project two years ago to address that need, initiating an ambitious effort to reach out to the industry and improve Linux camera support for mobile, embedded and desktop systems. We are eagerly looking forward to actively participating in the Exploratory Group and deepening our collaboration with all the involved parties.”

About EMVA

The European Machine Vision Association is a non-for-profit and non-commercial association representing the Machine Vision industry in Europe. The association was founded in 2003 to promote the development and use of vision technology in all sectors, and represents members from within Europe, North America, and Asia. The EMVA is open for all types of organizations having a stake in machine vision, computer vision, embedded vision or imaging technologies: manufacturers, system and machine builders, integrators, distributors, consultancies, research organizations and academia. All members – as the 100% owners of the association – benefit from the networking, cooperation, standardization, and the numerous and diverse activities of the EMVA. The EMVA is the host of four global machine vision standards: The two widely established standards GenICam and EMVA 1288 as well as the two standardization initiatives Open Optics Camera Interface (OOCI) and Embedded Vision Interface Standard (emVision).

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 150 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Remi Del Mar, senior product manager of digital experiences, AR and commercial display solutions at Epson, said that the COVID-19 pandemic and move to remote work has accelerated AR use cases.

“It’s not just a wearable as much as it is a device for knowledge transfer for training, industrial maintenance and retail showcasing,” said Del Mar.

Smart glasses will be key devices in industry 4.0 areas such as manufacturing, auto, field service, he said. On the remote work and collaboration front, smart glasses can find a use as a secondary screen.

As for the Spinar America partnership, Epson is teaming up with its partner to integrate Epson Moverio AR smart glasses with Spinar’s Remote Vision SaaS offering with Zoom video conferencing.

The stack allows a remote expert to see what a local technician sees and provide real-time visual guidance. The product integration also allows for faster repairs and fewer mistakes. Via Zoom, Spinar can bring together remote experts and on-site personnel easily with the Moverio’s smart glasses built-in camera.

Del Mar said that Spinar and Epson already have pilots going with the joint offering.

JVC’s prototype, as reported in late 2020 by Mogura, achieves a 120-degree field of view (FOV) and 2.5k per-eye resolution. The PC-tethered headset can use SteamVR tracking to make use of compatible controllers such as Valve Index or Vive wands. This mirror technology is similar to that of Augmented Reality headsets like Nreal Light, but on a larger FOV and scale.

The headset enables users to maintain a direct view of physical objects and machinery while large-format virtual images are projected onto it. JVC claims that the technology is capable of reproducing “clear images without the screen door effect” in addition to reduced colour aberration. A wide eye box also allows for a greater physical range of wearing positions.

According to Road to VR, it is currently unclear as to whether JVC is beginning a full immersion into enterprise market production, or simply testing the waters of demand. The latest development is that the device is headed to enterprise partners starting from late March this year.

Read the full article, including the spec sheet for the headset, here.

The AR technology will be used primarily to support assembly skills and production transfer. This will help to kickstart new manufacturing facilities, enable a virtual sales and marketing approach, and provide remote technical support. There has been increased demand from the healthcare industry for tasks such as specialist pump supply to feed fermentation tanks used to provide COVID-19 vaccines. Alongside this, management must develop a new way of selling and marketing products.

Martin Johnston, Strategic Business Development Director at Watson-Marlow, stated that the company has been working with PTC for over five years now. He acknowledges that the pandemic has accelerated the requirement for digital transformation, AR in particular. The immediate priority for WMFTG was skills transfer; Vuforia Expert Capture enables recording of production line processes and editing in the cloud. Using wearables such as Microsoft’s HoloLens, this knowledge can then be imparted to new engineers in the form of a step-by-step guide.

Advantages of the technology mentioned by Johnston include:

• Faster set-up speed
• Significant cost reductions
• Ability to train employees to perform ‘out-of-core’ roles
• Eliminates risk of spreading COVID-19

General Manager for UK at PTC, David Grammer, added that AR is a “game-changer” for the industry when applied correctly. PTC’s Vuforia technology is said to play an important role in business. Grammer believes WMFTG’s digital transformation plan will create cost, safety, and operational benefits.

Johnston further stated that the ultimate focus will be on marketing and sales. Connecting to potential customers will be conducted via virtual shows, webinars, or demonstrating product capabilities in real-time AR.

Read the full article here, and see PTC’s AREA member profile here.

“By rendering each application remotely as a whole, ISAR enables visualization and interaction with highly polygonal, data-intensive content such as 3D objects, 3D CAD models or BIM data. The CPU and GPU of the end device are only required to a small extent, which in the long term will help to reduce the size of the end devices and optimize the form factor,” said Philipp Landgraf, Head of Technology at Holo-Light. “Remote rendering enables AR and VR content to be experienced in unprecedented detail and complexity, from the industrial sector to entertainment and gaming”.

A device-agnostic approach through deployed client applications also reduces the development effort for XR applications. New apps can be developed simpler and without limits and restrictions of individual end devices by just building a server application. Time-consuming prepping and reducing of data for performance reasons is no longer necessary. Streaming complete applications also increases data security. As soon as the remote rendering technology ISAR comes into play, the data remains on the server chosen by the customer. Data is merely streamed and not stored on the mobile device.

How Does ISAR Work?

Usually AR or VR apps are developed in a game engine, for example Unity or Unreal. The visual representation of menu structures as well as the interaction possibilities are individually designed by the developer according to the respective device (e.g. HoloLens 2, Magic Leap, Smartphone etc.). The app is subject to technical requirements and limitations (CPU, GPU, RAM) of the end device.

Now, the ISAR SDK is a new component that enables users to outsource demanding work processes such as application logic or content rendering. This means that the computing power does not have to come from, for example, the AR-Glasses themselves, but can be provided unlimitedly by a powerful local server or from the cloud.

Once the ISAR SDK is built into an application, the app no longer needs to be installed directly on an end device. Instead, the app is installed and run on the more powerful server or in the cloud. The user simply connects from a provided gateway (client app) on the mobile device to the XR application on the external server. Now, the rendering process shifts from the low-performance XR device to the high-performance server. The client app sends data – sensor data for room tracking, position data and hand gestures – to the server with the actual application. There, the data is processed and the to be displayed 3D content is sent back to the client app. The result is real-time streaming of XR content.

Read more in Holo-Light press release.

See Holo-Light AREA member profile page.

Both hires as Senior Sales Directors – at Nextech AR, will establish the Company as a market-leading partner for all things augmented reality across the globe region. This will include introducing Nextech’s platform and tools to high-value markets such as higher education, eCommerce, virtual events, financial services, and healthcare through large client acquisitions across these verticals.

Mcleod was Senior Sales Director (EMEA) at Fastly, a market-leading edge cloud computing solution, where he rebuilt the company’s media, broadcast, and entertainment vertical from the ground up, across the UK and other European markets.

Highlights included key wins with Sky News Arabia, Tomorrowland festival, and a large-scale image redesign with The Guardian. Mcleod also acted as a consultant for Ericsson Innovation Labs, where he advised on their Edge Computing strategy, and acted as Major Account Executive at Cedexis, a significant disruptor to the CDN & Cloud performance optimization industry acquired by Citrix.

“I’m excited to start with Nextech and begin working alongside and learning from the vast array of talent found at this company. I believe there is incredible potential to create truly immersive virtual experiences that inspire and change the world for our customers,” said Zak Mcleod, Senior Director of Sales – EMEA at Nextech AR. “I’m passionate about delivering business value and enabling meaningful ways to connect with audiences using new technologies – in today’s world, solution providers must look for ways to introduce tools which have a positive impact on social life and the way we communicate together. I believe the combination of market-leading technology, Evan’s hunger and vision, as well as the experience and know-how of the leadership team across the business means we are uniquely placed to lead the way in the AR market across the UK and European markets.”

“I’m delighted to welcome Zak and Rory who both have their finger on the pulse of new wave technologies reshaping the way we live, work and learn, making them ideal hires as demand is accelerating and Nextech is rapidly expanding to meet this demand throughout the EMEA, and North American markets,” said Evan Gappelberg, CEO of Nextech AR. “Having talented salespeople with a history of success is key to driving revenue as we build towards our goal of $50-60 million in 2021.”

Over the past six months, Nextech has actively sought out leading technology industry experts who can elevate the company’s mission, provide value, and drive revenue across all verticals. Due it it’s unique value proposition, Nextech has been successful in attracting top tier talent from SAP, Apple, Microsoft Corporation, Disney, IBM, Oracle, NortonLifeLock  and now Fastly and Salesforce.com.