Lockheed Martin’s F-35 factory is using Epson Moverio BT-200 and NGRAIN software to accelerate assembly, train mechanics and improve efficiency in a variety of use cases. Though still in pilot phase, the feature article in Popular Mechanics is likely to get a lot of attention and help other companies take AR more seriously for their information delivery needs.

Two senior executives of AREA charter member Huntington Ingalls Industries have unveiled their new venture: Index AR Solutions. The startup focuses on providing services and solutions to large enterprise customers and leverages know how from past AR projects in article inspection, training, assembly and construction, maintenance and logistics.

If some had visited the Nokia Research Labs in 2011 and 2012 they would have seen some technologies that are remarkably similar to those demonstrated in the Microsoft HoloLens product. In this blog post on the WinBeta portal, the author speculates that the connections are close and have not all been revealed. Stay tuned for more in 2015.

Sometimes a diagram is worth more than 1000 words but doesn’t include all the words you might have included. The new infographic prepared by ImmersisVR is a case in point. It compares the features of 5 hands-free display models across a few attributes: sociability, human factors, field of view,  manipulation of 3D objects and date of release.

The company released its Kickstarter-funded developer kit in late 2014 but everyone recognizes that the product is not ready for mass market (or even mass enterprise) use. Confirming its commitment to enterprise, Meta has closed its series A round with $23M led by Horizons Ventures, Tim Draper, BOE Optoelectronics and Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian of Y Combinator.

Gigaom, a market research firm, has published a new report about Enterprise AR. The report summary on the Gigaom portal provides four key findings:

• Law enforcement, health care, and the military are among the first industries to embrace augmented reality solutions. AR is also making headway in industries such as education and auto-manufacturing.
• Growth in most other enterprise segments will come more slowly.
• Dedicated device cost, an absence of standards, and the lack of an app ecosystem are significant inhibitors to short-term adoption, though all those issues should be substantially addressed in the next several years.
• Deployments won’t be easy: In addition to the cost of hardware and software, businesses must consider the cost of integrating AR solutions with legacy infrastructures to determine efficacy and measure ROI.

In this feature article on EETimes, Junko Yoshida pulls together the many disparate trends that are driving the growth of Augmented Reality. The entry of major technology companies like Intel and Microsoft provide credibility and are helping those who have doubts about AR to see the numerous opportunities more clearly.   

DHL Supply Chain and Ricoh released the results of a pilot to test hands-free AR-assisted warehouse picking with VuzixM100. The results demonstrated a 25% improvement in efficiency when used by 10 order pickers selecting more than 20,000 items and fulfilling 9,000 orders within a three-week period.

In this piece in InformationWeek, NGRAIN’s Barry Po summarizes his assessment of enterprise AR at CES 2015. Po contends we’re in the “second generation of glasses,” and that business use-cases are moving at a much faster pace than consumer interest.

In the days following the Microsoft introduction of HoloLens, a prototype showing holographic personal display capabilities, many news outlets have released their reviews. The purpose of this CNET feature is to clarify the confusion many continue to have between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. 

This feature’s explanations rarely use the terms AR and VR to compare how the two platforms are different. One of the points this piece makes clear is that Microsoft can integrate technologies from other groups to increase HoloLens functionality. For example, the HoloLens remote expert scenario is enabled by Skype. What if Microsoft were to release an SDK for Skype on Hands-free Displays? Then all the devices of that class would be able to support real time calling with those using Skype, whether on PCs, laptops, tablets or…other hands-free displays. Interoperability is not a concept frequently associated with these devices.