The Early Access Partnership Program is intended for those organizations who are currently considering augmented reality / virtual reality / and mixed reality (XR) solutions presently and wish to get their hands on the product as early as possible.

Participants in the Program will be able to get a head start and work closely with Cemtrex as it rolls out this cost saving and productivity improvement software tool. To join the WorkbenchXR Early Access Program please visit www.workbenchxr.com.

Cemtrex intends to charge a per headset license fee for the product, however, the earliest adopters will receive VIP pricing. The application will be available this summer but Early Access participants will get priority access.

WorkbenchXR is intended to help assembly workers in manufacturing environments utilize both VR and AR headsets as well as connected “smart tools” to assemble products faster, reduce errors, and improve the quality assurance process. The application helps workers assemble products using custom designed work flows created by the team in an easy and agile manner.

WorkbenchXR can be utilized for all manufacturing industries where various parts are being assembled including aerospace, measurement, automotive, machinery, electronics, and many others. Additionally, the software tool can be used in distribution environments where object and marker tracking can be utilized to improve the efficiency and accuracy of tracking packages and equipment.

More can be read on GlobeNewsWire.

Peritus.ai is a tech startup which until now has been in “stealth mode”, but is now developing ways of utilising artificial intelligence to increase efficiency of data centre management.  They have received $2 million funding from venture capital firm Ideaspring Capital and The Hive, which will be used to expand and fortify their presence in India.

Ideaspring Capital is based in Bengaluru and was founded in 2016 by Naganand Doraswamy to invest in home-grown product startups. The fund has participated in seed rounds in Zapty providing enterprise software for collaborating on project management and task management; in Whodat, an augmented reality platform for developers to create inclusive AR experiences with markerless technology; in Lavelle Networks working on cloud computing and enterprise software.

Peritus is developing AI solutions for the enterprise. Data centres serve as the basis for delivering modern enterprise IT services such as the cloud. IoT Cloud Operators and Service Providers have to provide high availability and resilience, avoid downtime and accommodate fast-changing technology landscape and greater infrastructure complexity.

The startup further says that proof of concept is clear in how one of their early adopter customers was able to reduce their support burden by 65.7 percent while handling 37 percent more support requests.

The article explains how Peritus is applying AI and machine learning to infrastructure management for enterprise benefits and the business’ aims.  They have provable success stories as one of Peritus’ early adopter customers were able to reduce their support burden by 65.7% and handle 37% more support requests.

Full article on BWDisrupt.

The dynaEdge AR Smart Glasses, using AiR Enterprise, provide a solution for industrial applications, such as:

• Field service
• Dealer service
• Manufacturing and repair operations
• Assembly line management
• Technician and expert training
• Warehouse picking
• Asset inspection and repair
• Remote visualization and support

The AiR Enterprise AR solution will be available on Toshiba dynaEdge AR Smart Glasses in Q2 of 2018. The integrated suite of capabilities includes:

• User point of view photo and video capture using embedded camera
• Configurable step-by-step task guidance with gesture-based interactions
• See-What-I-See video conferencing via remote communications
• Detailed task and workflow process analytics
• Enterprise grade security (on-device, in-transit, at-rest)
• Easy integration with other enterprise systems
• Barcode scanning and info display

Soulaiman Itani, co-founder and CEO of Atheer, is quoted to have said that the company believes their partnership with Toshiba will be beneficial for enterprises that require a Windows 10-based enterprise AR solution. Carl Pinto, vice president of marketing and engineering at Client Solutions Division, Toshiba, is also quoted to have said that their partnership with Atheer enables them to provide an enterprise-ready, AR solution, and that Atheer have proved their experience and tech leadership within the sector.

The dynaEdge AR Smart Glasses integrates Toshiba’s dynaEdge AR100 Head Mounted Display with its dynaEdge DE-100 Mobile Mini PC to make way for a wearable system that optimises productivity, security, and mobility. Its implementation with AiR Enterprise is the first time it has been offered on Windows 10.

Judges will look for:

• An outline of the device, solution, service or project and its role within the AR/VR industry.
• Specific characteristics which make the device, solution, service or project successful/unique
• A demonstration of the benefit of the device, solution, service or project to its intended audience, with case study examples where appropriate
• An explanation of the KPIs by which success has or will be measuredIf you think you think your product has what it takes to win The AR & VR Futureproof Award, submit your entry before the 16th April.

Designed for enterprise customers, Toshiba’s new dynaEdgeTM AR Smart Glasses packages together the company’s new dynaEdge AR100 Head Mounted Display (HMD) with its dynaEdge DE-100 Mobile Mini PC for a completely wearable PC system maximizing mobility, productivity and security without compromising flexibility.

From BrainXChange: “Determining ROI a key challenge faced by enterprises today in the still-early days of the technology, for it’s not always a simple matter of numbers and percentages.  At BrainXChange’s EWTS events, real end users shared first-hand experiences of and outside-the-box thinking about gauging the ROI of wearables in your business.

When we talk about ROI, we usually talk in terms of concrete numbers. But what we heard from a number of enterprise users is that it’s often not easy to pin down numbers with wearable technology; sometimes it’s more practical – even necessary – to qualify than to quantify the success of these devices in your organization.

Peter Godino, Hershey Company: “There is always an ROI when you’re improving the way you do something [but] there are some things I don’t like to put KPIs to. I know there’s an enhancement. Sometimes it’s improving the quality of life for your engineering team or the people on the floor. A lot of metrics cannot be expressed as a dollar return, but we’ve seen a lot of benefits from wearable technology. Line uptime will be one of the big outcomes, though we cannot claim to have seen a reduction in downtime at this time; but we’re pretty sure we’ll have that information in the future.”

While you might view that as sort of a gamble – banking on the hope that one day there will be numerical data to support the adoption of wearables in enterprise – improving employees’ quality of life is no minor benefit:

Kristi Montgomery, Kenco Logistics: “Improving the quality of life for those end users (warehouse workers) is hard to quantify from a dollar perspective…Employee satisfaction and engagement–if we can improve that [then] we feel like we’ve accomplished something even if there’s no hard dollar amount we can account for.”

Peter also spoke to the idea that sometimes you just know there’s an enhancement:

Dawn Bridges, Jacobs Engineering: “A wearable that recognizes a barcode is an efficiency.” Replacing hand-held barcode scanners with something wearable that frees up workers’ hands is a clear efficiency, supported by sheer logic if not by a percentage.

George Bowser of DHL gave two sides to the ROI coin: There’s measuring the impact of wearables on productivity and accuracy; and then there are less calculable, even emotional, indicators like ergonomics, impact on workers themselves, and user acceptance. And sometimes it might be necessary to weigh some metrics against others: If it’s not possible to (accurately) calculate an increase in productivity over the short lifespan of a pilot program; talking with users – even handing out questionnaires as DHL does – might reveal other, more immediately observable improvements such as less physical strain or awkwardness for workers using smart glasses to scan items instead of a handheld scanner.”

Other case studies and quotes from the full article can be read here.

With this latest round of Series-D funding, Magic Leap now has over $2.3 billion available to develop its smartglasses that it has been working on for quite some time. These smartglasses have been shown in public, but only by Shaquille O’Neal, who has invested in the company in the past.

According to reports, Magic Leap is spending around $50 million per month right now, so the company definitely needed to raise some funds. Over at Magic Leap, there are a few allegations of employees funning contracts to those that they have personal relationships with. Which means that Magic Leap is spending a lot more money then it actually needs to be spending, which is also why it is burning through money pretty quickly. Definitely not a good look when you are a startup, and haven’t even produced a single product yet. Currently, Magic Leap has around 1400 employees, and also have offices in Florida (where it is based), as well as in Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Zurich, New Zealand and Israel.

While Magic Leap is working on smartglasses right now, that’s not the only thing the company is looking to build. It is also looking to build the “full stack”. That means it wants to build the software and content that would run on these glasses. So far, these glasses look pretty similar to a regular pair of glasses, and a bit more standard than what Google put out with Project Glass a few years ago. That will likely help it get adopted a bit more, especially in a world where many are afraid of being recorded everywhere they go. But smartglasses are a virtually untapped market, and can be useful for a number of things.

This latest financing builds on the momentum of the past 12 months for Upskill, where the company grew its multinational client base by more than 300 percent. In addition, last year Upskill introduced a new release of its flagship Skylight AR platform which added self-service AR workflow creation and data integration features, expanded its ease of use and interoperability with enterprise IT architectures, and helped accelerate adoption to a six-fold increase in usage across its client base. Global industry leaders use Skylight on smart glasses to further increase productivity, cut costs and reduce errors across their operations in more than a dozen countries.

“We are ramping up our use of Skylight and wearables inside our operations. Boeing is seeing multiple aircraft manufacturing lines benefit from the solution, and we now want to introduce AR into the services part of our business so we may service our own, and third-party products, for our end-customers,” said Ted Colbert, CIO of The Boeing Company and SVP of Information Technology & Data Analytics.

“Upskill’s augmented reality platform for smart glasses has enabled greater efficiencies in Ryder’s warehouses—from saving time and improving accuracy, to streamlining the jobs of hands-on warehouse personnel,” said Gary Allen, Vice President of Supply Chain Excellence, Ryder. “The use of wearable, hands-free technology powered by Skylight has decreased the time it takes to pick and scan inventory while improving efficiency. At Ryder, we’re all about investing in technologies that ensure safety and reliability, as well as improved productivity, visibility, and customer service levels.”

“As we continue to invest heavily in our infrastructure to help our customers to connect, our ability to service and maintain network performance is critical to the success of our business,” said Sanjay Rai, General Manager, Strategy and Productivity, Telstra Network Construction & Services. “We believe that trialing Upskill’s Skylight platform for our AR pilot program will allow us to test Upskill’s new technology as a way to connect our field technicians to network equipment in ways we couldn’t before, and potentially contribute to improving productivity and driving down costs.”

Upskill’s growing list of strategic investors, including GE Ventures and Boeing HorizonX, now joined by Accenture and Cisco Investments, points to the increasing importance of AR technology in the market, the connected worker and the Internet of Things ecosystem.

“We saw substantial growth in the last year further amplified by the launch of our new product release. That acceleration is what led our investors to participate in this new funding round,” said Brian Ballard, co-founder and CEO, Upskill. “Upskill’s group of investors now include leaders from all parts of the industrial augmented reality ecosystem, which is an important signal in the market and speaks to how we collectively contribute to digital transformation.”

The full press release can be viewed here.

Upskill’s member profile can be viewed here.

Member news from XMReality!

At the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 XMReality signed two new customers; an American Defense group and Electrolux, a multinational home appliance manufacturer.

This is great news for our member and we are very pleased for them that increasingly more enterprises are taking up the use of Augmented Reality within their business.

“XMReality clearly appeared to us as the best solution in the area, especially the hand overlay feature which makes the support extremely intuitive and easy”, says Jean-Noel Thibault, Digital Transformation Director, Electrolux Major Appliances, EMEA.

XMReality says: “We are very happy to include them into our XMReality family!”

XMReality’s AREA member profile can be viewed here.

PCTEL, a leader in Performance Critical TELecom solutions, has developed an Augmented Reality SeeWave® concept which was demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2018 (MWC) in Barcelona.  SeeWave is an interference locating system in the form of a handheld hunting tool, used to track unwanted signals that harm network performance by wireless operators.

Jeff Miller, Senior Vice President and GM at RF Solutions, is quoted to have said that it is vital to have efficient interference hunting for operators to maximise capacity and add spectrum.

PCTEL’s AR-based interference detection system concept is relevant to the future of test.  SeeWave’s new Android user interface will enable quicker and easier interference tracking using flex scanning receivers.

David Neumann, CEO of PCTEL, is also quoted to have said that the company is looking forward to seeing how AR can help their customers with wireless network performance.