Florida-based Magic Leap has acquired Israel-based cybersecurity software solutions provider North-Bit, according to a Geektime report.

North-Bit, founded in 2012, was in the news in March 2016 when it claimed it had exploited the Android Stagefright bug. Security researchers successfully demonstrated how exploitation of the bug would allow remote hacking of older versions of Android smartphonse. North-Bit specializes in computer forensics, reverse engineering and CPU optimizations.

Since Magic Leap has recently raised a large amount of capital (Series C in February 2016 raised $793m) bringing their market valuation to $4.5 billion. Investors in Magic Leap’s latest round include Alibaba Group, Warner Brothers, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Andreessen Horowitz.

The fact that Augmented Reality has multiple uses for enterprise suggests that it makes sense for Magic Leap to improve cyber security aspects of their software. The report suggests that future collaborations and acquisitions may be in the cards owing to the large amount of investment capital having been raised.

An article by Deloitte University Press published on February 24, 2016, outlines the roles and benefits of Augmented Reality in the workplace, citing use cases in medicine, construction, training and simulation, communication, collaboration, field and customer service and interactive marketing.

The article outlines how AR and VR adoption in the workplace is likely to outstrip consumer adoption and informs enterprises of what they can do to prepare for the introduction of Augmented Reality in enterprise. They argue that the volatility of the marketplace will be likely to improve rapid feature expansion, drive down prices and increase vendor collaboration and offerings. The article outlines practical installations and new technologies that enterprises will need to consider to get ready for AR adoption including connectivity, beacons, sensors and QR tags, depending on the organization in question.

The authors assert that the timing is right for companies to undertake audits to prepare for AR and VR advancements in technology. Namely, justifying their use cases around single purposes with measurable impact and value. The authors encourage business executives, IT managers and end users to equip themselves with knowledge now for how AR tools may be applied to drive value in their workplaces.
Original article authors are Nelson Kunkel, Steve Soechtig, Jared Miniman and Chris Stauch.

There are many new devices for those who want to deliver Augmented Reality experiences to the workplace. The landscape of offerings is getting ever more segmented and vendors are making many new claims. The options can be confusing making it difficult for enterprise customers to choose.

This post on the Examiner blog gives a concise look at eight head-worn, hands-free displays that enterprise managers may want to consider.

The roundup of devices is helpful because it includes a photo of the device, a short summary of the company’s offerings and links to more information. In the future, it will be valuable for such posts to include hands-on reviews by professionals with clear criteria and performance benchmarks.

Austrian startup, AR4 GmbH, has announced that its computer vision-based 3D tracking technology targeting industrial use cases, Vizar.Track, is now commercially available. The new markerless tracking technology is SLAM-based and optimized for existing mobile platforms.

The Vizar team, led by TU Graz senior research scientist, Clemens Arth, is also working on a mobile camera calibration tool, VIZARIO.Cam. VIZARIO.Cam created sets of calibration records for multiple resolutions and multiple focal settings, which in turn can be used to improve tracking and recognition results. Finally, the company has released preliminary information about a mobile visual search library, VIZARIO.Find.

AR4 is a spin-off of the Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision of the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Led by Dieter Schmalstieg, who is currently an advisor to AR4, this institute is the research powerhouse which developed technology for the patents acquired by Qualcomm from Imagination Computer Services GmbH in 2010 (and that became Vuforia).

According to a post on the Real Wire blog, there is a new market research report published by Beecham Research. The report entitled “Augmented Reality and Wearable Technology – an operational tool for the enterprise” summarizes industry trends in 2015 and explores the benefits and challenges in adopting Augmented Reality (AR) in enterprises.

The post states that Beecham’s analyst and the report’s author Matthew Duke-Woolley forecasts that the market for enterprise Augmented Reality could approach $800 million in 2020.

Forecasting the growth of enterprise Augmented Reality is a difficult process that relies on numerous assumptions with high uncertainty. If you’d like to learn more about the methods and assumptions used by leading analyst firms, please plan to attend the March 17 AREA webinar.

Each year Sikorsky Innovations, the advanced research organization of Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company, conducts a contest, the Entrepreneurial Challenge. The purpose of the contest is to identify emerging technologies that could be used in the company’s helicopters and to partner with companies which are developing these technologies. In 2015 the challenge identified Augmented Reality for manufacturing as one of the four areas of interest. AREA member iQagent received recognition as one of the most promising companies with a solution in this segment.

For the 2016 challenge, Sikorsky Innovations has once again selected an Augmented Reality segment. Rather than mobile solutions, the challenge is to identify the best companies developing transparent or on-glass visualization technologies. According to the Challenge web site description, the use cases are pilots who need to maintain visual awareness while obtaining new information and passengers seeking to see information overlaid on the landscape through which they are traveling.

The company invites companies developing hardware and/or software solutions that can transform any hard, transparent surface into an on-demand, interactive data center to submit applications on or before May 20, 2016.

AREA member Catchoom is a Barcelona-based computer vision technology service provider and developer of visual search enabling technologies which sends its team to Mobile World Congress each year. In this post on the Catchoom blog, the marketing team describes the situation at MWC 2016 very succinctly: it was more like a ‘Virtual Reality World Congress.’  The first highlight of the post is the photo of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg casually strolling amid hundreds of journalists wearing Samsung VR headsets during the Samsung preview evening event. This really set the stage for what blossomed into a global discussion about potential risks of VR turning people into tethered, captive puppets.

The post then provides insights about the vendors which were showing AR and making announcements in conjunction with the event. The most notable Augmented Reality announcement covered in the Catchoom blog was the Epson Moverio BT-300 introduction. Other highlights included the Fujitsu helmet for industrial workers.

The financial services firm Morgan Stanley has released a short video segment in which Katy Huberty, managing director, IT hardware analyst, shares her opinion that Augmented Reality will receive a great deal of new attention from investors globally in coming years.

https://youtu.be/9Q9kfhiy-0s

In the very brief analysis captured in the video, Huberty suggests that the growth of Augmented and Virtual Reality hardware will resemble that of smart phones in the recent past.

Creating holographic applications is going to be challenging. In preparation for shipment of its HoloLens Development Edition hardware at the end of March, Microsoft has opened its new Windows Holographic developer portal to help those getting started. Text on the portal’s developer overview section explains that HoloLens is a Universal Windows Platform. The developer needs to develop “holographic apps,” all of which are Universal Windows apps. Conversely, all Universal Windows apps can be adapted for presentation on Microsoft HoloLens.

Developing for HoloLens requires more than new software. The paradigm is different and this requires new terminology. For example, in Augmented Reality, developers describe and develop experiences within the real world. An interactive scene is the real world and the experience runs within it. In HoloLens the real world and hologram are referred to as the “shell” or the “mixed world.” The platform documentation also introduces concepts such as persistence of holograms. To keep some things familiar, Microsoft has extended Cortana, the desktop or mobile phone user’s personal assistant, for use on HoloLens.

The first of the eight planned tutorials in a dedicated “Holographic Academy” on Unity as well many other topics, focuses on the HoloLens Emulator (only 44 seconds published at the time of this post). A developer discussion forum is also provided in the portal. It will be interesting to see how much Microsoft will need to add in order to keep the developer ecosystem pushing the envelope once it has the new hardware to test.

As more people begin to read about and to experiment with wearable technologies and Augmented Reality, there is increasing confusion around definitions and concepts. A very common source of confusion is the label “AR and VR,” or “ARVR” for short. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this confusion surrounding Augmented Reality does not help anyone. Customers can’t clearly explain what they need. Providers of technology are often unable to express what they offer.

In August 2014, long before the current wave of interest in VR, the question of what “True AR” means and what it takes to deliver it was the subject of an international workshop hosted by Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)’s Interactive Media Design Lab. Researchers conducted a series of lectures and chaired round table discussions.

An excellent white paper written based on the workshop outcomes has recently been released. The collaboration between researchers Christian Sandor, Martin Fuchs, Alvaro Cassinelli, Hao Li, Richard Newcombe, Goshiro Yamamoto and Steven Feiner spans questions of definitions (What exactly do we mean by True AR?), benefits and approaches before exploring the technical and ethical challenges.

This paper should be required reading for those new to the field of Augmented Reality or for those who persist to blur the lines between AR and VR or AR and other forms of information presentation. For those who do not have time to digest the full report, a synopsis of the paper’s key concepts has been published on TechCrunch.