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.

This acquisition accelerates the development of Atheer’s award-winning Augmented Reality Management Platform by combining Atheer’s existing leading real-time collaboration capabilities with the intelligent digital work and integration capabilities of the Flype platform.

“We are seeing an accelerating adoption of AR by enterprises across many industries and business processes. These organizations are demanding AR platforms that have enterprise grade security and user permission management, robust digital asset management across all their content stores, intelligent and dynamic work instructions on all devices, broad integration capabilities to other enterprise systems, and robust reporting and analytics” said Amar Dhaliwal, Chief Executive Officer of Atheer. “With Flype, we have acquired an enterprise grade digital work platform that significantly extends our capabilities in all these areas. The combination of Atheer and Flype redefines what enterprises can expect from an AR platform.”

Founded in San Francisco, California, Flype’s digital work platform intelligently and securely connects users with the digital assets, work instructions, and resources they need to do their best work.

“The foundation of the Flype platform is the ability to truly understand users, assess their needs in real time, understand spatial conditions and deliver highly contextual content to create personalized AR experience at scale. We are thrilled that Atheer and its customers will be taking advantage of these capabilities.” said Nag Chandrashekar, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Flype

Flype’s founders Sanjay Parmar and Nag Chandrashekar have joined Atheer’s leadership team as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.

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.

Sayduck enables e-commerce companies to develop their digital product portfolio into 3D and allows end consumers to deploy virtual 3D models into the real-world based on the latest Augmented Reality technology.

Since 2018, Sayduck has collaborated with Shopify Inc, a world-leading e-commerce platform that powers more than 800,000 businesses. Sayduck is Shopify’s first AR-partner and the company’s AR- and 3D modeling services are marketed towards Shopify’s client base.

Maria A Grimaldi, CEO of the Bublar Group: “The acquisition of Sayduck is part of our strategy to offer scalable XR technology. Our current subsidiary Vobling has built a strong position as an agency providing the enterprise sector with the latest XR-solutions. Now we can add a proven augmented reality SaaS-platform for the fast growing retail and e-commerce business, transforming their product visualization capabilities.”

Niklas Slotte, CEO of Sayduck, “We are proud to be part of Bublar Group. Together we will strengthen our position as the leading Nordic company within XR technology and can meet the increasing demand from a global market. 3D and Augmented Reality are the next natural steps in the development for both web and mobile commerce. With our platform, we help brands and retailers to easily showcase their products in 3D”.

About 10,000 products in 3D have been created on the Sayduck platform. The the number of daily 3D views via Sayduck has increased from about 500 in 2016 to about 12,500 at the end of 2018. This shows the increasing use of AR by customers who want to AR-visualize the product range for web and mobile.

The Augmented Reality technology within B2B, Enterprise AR, is growing at a rapid pace, with a significant contribution from the retail sector. 100 million consumers are expected to trade with the support of AR online and in stores by 2020, according to Gartner. 25% of global e- and m-commerce will be AR-adapted in 2030 according to Citibank.

Greg Clark visited the Factory 2050 in Sheffield to see how a powerful private sector consortium led by Rolls-Royce and Accenture – and drawn from the aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical industries – has collaborated with the University of Sheffield AMRC (long standing AREA member) to develop a connected facility that will de-risk investment in the digital technologies at the heart of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy and Made Smarter initiative.

Mr Clark, and the Minister for Business and Industry, Andrew Stephenson, were given a tour of the connected smart factory test bed which included real time data streams from remote machining activities, smart assembly using intelligent work benches and augmented reality, visual inspection linked to artificial intelligence and a reconfigurable factory cell.

The test bed aims to show the significant opportunities of applying digital technologies to manufacturing with 50% productivity benefit, 30% reduction in defects and 50% improved time to market increasingly being demonstrated.

The article features comment on the initiative from the Secretary of State, Greg Clark, Founder and Executive Dean of the AMRC, Professor Keith Ridgway and from The Director of Global Manufacturing at Rolls-Royce Dr Hamid Mughal. Read the full article here.

Read The AMRC’s AREA member profile