Apple’s MR headset development has been in the works for years, but plans are now at the forefront. The company will start by first deliberately releasing an expensive, niche headset to prepare the market and developers for future Augmented Reality glasses. The article explains how Apple’s approach is likely to play out:

• Not just AR or VR: They will reportedly start with a primarily Virtual Reality headset, with limited Augmented Reality function, similar to Facebook’s Oculus Quest. Apple has consistently expressed that AR is the “bigger opportunity”, therefore the initial focus will most likely be on enterprise AR and VR applications.
• Standalone: Rather than tethered, a standalone approach will be taken, meaning that MR will function as its own platform. Customised content and apps will be available, the goggles will have Mac-class processing power, and screens will be a much higher resolution than in current VR devices. This will enable enterprises to create immersive 3D experiences from desktop computer apps.
• Timing of release: Bloomberg has suggested a 2022 launch of the MR goggles, followed by a lightweight AR glasses release in several years. Judging by this, Apple’s approach will then allow developers a year or two to test MR hardware apps.

The article encourages companies to consider what to put in place to allow for MR integration, including:

• Cost: Various price points include $2000, $1000, and $500. This will differ depending on whether the business uses a couple of headsets, or deploys them across their entire workforce.
• Data visualisation: Presentations, existing 2D data, and immersive 3D key apps will need a visualisation strategy.
• Employee experience: Preparations must be put in place to either hire or train employees with MR experience.
• The customer’s role: Enriching the customer experience, and setting customer expectations for the technology.

Concluding, the article acknowledges that there may currently be more questions than answers regarding MR integration. There is still plenty of time for companies to develop a digital transformation strategy, but ideally they need to start now.

Many tech insiders and analysts believe the AR glasses will replace smartphones in the next 8-10 years.

MagicLeap, another AREA member, has now shifted its focus on selling AR glasses to industrial users.

Tech companies are exploring the technology’s business relevance and its role in the workforce enablement, customer experience and product enhancement.

AR technology holds tremendous promise for changing the way businesses operate.

Just a few of the kinds of benefits that businesses are experiencing are: contextualised information, increased workflow standardisation, hands-free assistance and documentation.

Read the full original article to find out more.

Vuzix develops AR displays in the form of smart glasses (e.g. the Vuzix M400), some of which are regular glasses, and some of which attach to safety glasses and hardhats. Most of their current use cases are with the enterprise and medical industry, but Travers expects that adoption will soon increase in logistics and warehousing as well.

With remote assistance having become increasingly valuable in the medical industry, Vuzix’s smart glasses have been used by medical professionals to get expert advice from another hospital and to film operations. Throughout the pandemic, the technology has also been used for “virtual rounds”, allowing an individual practitioner to receive real-time feedback from a remote support team while making rounds. Soon, Vuzix will also be collaborating with Verizon to bring 5G-enables smart glasses to EMTs, allowing for emergency care to be provided before a patient has reached the hospital.

Storing and transporting the COVID vaccine is another complicated and specific medical task. Envirotainer, a company involved in this, now uses Vuzix headsets to allow for safe and correct handling of vaccines as cargo. This is a particularly vital use case. Travers acknowledges that XR is important for tradespeople and maintenance staff, since they’re not allowed into hospitals anymore.

As the article points out, COVID-19 didn’t create a demand for XR products and service, it only served to accelerate existing trends. Travers believes that AR smart glasses are the future of computing and will replace the phone.

Vuzix will be a part of this paradigm shift. Their next-generation model is anticipated for release later this year, and is a result of user feedback and improving technology.

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

With buzz rising over virtual and augmented reality technologies, Van Harken said it was clear that this was a space in which his company belonged.

“It became very apparent the immediate benefits from those programs — the value was immediately realized and spoke volumes,” said Van Harken, co-founder and chief strategy officer for Th3rd Coast Digital Solutions. “It made our decision easy. We’re going to put more of our focus into the enterprise and training side of things.”

 Augmented reality is when a user utilizes a device to view real world environments overlaid with computer-generated perceptual information with which the user can interact. Virtual reality provides an immersive experience where a user operates in a simulated environment.

Both technologies, referred to as extended reality (XR), have long been evolving and now are finding a place in manufacturing.

Training game-changer

Some manufacturers are early adopters of these technologies for a variety of applications, from employee training to product development and marketing.

Forging a strategic partnership with Boston-based computer software and services company PTC — and its AR software development kit (SDK) Vuforia — Th3rd Coast is heavily involved in the XR space.

Van Harken said it’s a welcome addition to manufacturing.

“A lot of people in those spaces are really in an analog state — pen to paper, no traceability, no digital threads through anything,” he said. “So, just getting anything digitized in that realm is a huge step forward. But, if you can create more efficiencies with how to train people faster and better, then you create a more agile and nimble workforce that can adapt to various changing conditions in the factory.”

Still, barriers exist in adapting XR technology, as seen in the fact that primarily large manufacturers are the ones adopting it. Education is a key part of the challenge, according to Van Harken.

To address this need for market education, Van Harken and Th3rd Coast established a nonprofit news network on XR technologies. The network, found at th3rdeyexr.com, highlights different ways that enterprise users are applying these technologies.

Training is one primary application for XR, providing an immersive experience even when a user is not necessarily on the shop floor. Through these technologies, manufacturers are able to transcend ineffective user manuals and other analog training materials. 

Additionally, it’s difficult to pass down knowledge from employees who were trained with analog materials decades ago.

“When they retire, in the past, that knowledge has retired with them,” Van Harken said. “One thing that XR/AR solutions provide is a method for early-extracting and documenting that knowledge to be able to pass it on. That’s the best way they learn.”

By using XR technology to train workers in the moment, Van Harken said that it can lead to a well-rounded workforce that contains fewer specialists and more generalists. And, for an industry that suffers from a chronic talent gap and workforce shortage, wooing a new generation to the job is vital.

Budget buster?

Price is another barrier that can block small manufacturers from reaping the benefits of XR technology. However, as it evolves, the hardware and technology is slowly becoming more affordable.

For instance, an OculusGo — a virtual reality headset developed by Facebook Technologies — is available for around $200. Walmart Inc. purchased thousands of the devices as it dedicated a large portion of its training to virtual reality.

Hudsonville-based Immy Inc., which recently started doing business as Optique, has an optic display system in the works that is poised to become more accessible to manufacturers of all sizes.

“Our technology and our approach — it’s very different in the fact that it’s very cost effective to manufacture and produce,” said Optique CEO Sam Vilardi. “So, I think the barrier to entry for us isn’t going to be nearly what the competition is so it will allow us to work with smaller manufacturers.”

Outside of training, product design and development is another prime application for XR technology. Vilardi pointed to Steelcase Inc. as an example of a company that utilizes this form of technology to bring together design and development teams from across the country.

“You start to create this experience that allows you to design more effectively and more efficiently because there are a lot of nuances in design,” Vilardi said. “Some people struggle visualizing without being able to see it and touch and feel it. This technology brings it that much closer.”

Optique also looks to improve upon one other factor that can sour manufacturers on using the technology.

“The reason these hardwares have not gained adoption, to be blunt, is they leave a lot to be desired for,” Vilardi said. “The experience sucks. A lot of them create nausea, motion sickness and eye fatigue.”

Marketing tool

Furniture manufacturer Trendway Corp. worked in conjunction with Th3rd Coast to bring augmented reality to its company — but not for training or product design.

The Holland-based company developed an application in 2018 called the Trendway AR Office Builder.

Through a smartphone camera, the app allows the user to digitally place Trendway’s furniture throughout a real world space, giving customers  an idea of how it would look.

The app also links the user to product information on Trendway’s website while housing videos where product experts walk through pertinent information associated with the product.

“In our case, we put together idea starters — it could be packages or full office setups,” said Nancy Stryker, Trendway’s director of marketing.

While the app wasn’t borne out of COVID, the pandemic has forced Trendway to start forging ahead with technology it had already been considering, as is the case with many other manufacturers.

“COVID really accelerated that need and desire for these technologies,” Stryker said. “We’re finding that it’s something that will only continue to grow.”

For further information on Barriers to AR adoption in manufacturing watch The AREA Research Committee webinar.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced many organizations to reconsider how well-equipped they are to deal with business disruptions that require more remote work. That’s especially true for industrial companies that succeeded pre-COVID through optimized supply chains and manufacturing processes and specialized employee skill sets.

AREA Executive Director Mark Sage recently spoke with Umar Arshad, Head of Growth for AR Products at PTC, to discuss how more organizations will now leverage AR to maintain business continuity and build resiliency.

Watch the discussion in the Video below:

A 2020 MPI Study revealed that 83% of manufacturing leaders see Industry 4.0 as “extremely or very important”, and 56% believe that Industry 4.0 will have a “significant impact” in the next five years. However, some organisations are wary of change due to scepticism, lack of skills, or financial complications. Despite this, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for investment.

With a focus on the “smart factory”, Industry 4.0 started over a decade ago. As the cost of sensor technology has decreased, adoption has increased. Martin Barkman, SVP and Global Head of Solution Management for Digital Supply Chain at SAP, is quoted to have said that Industry 4.0 has expanded from the factory and into the entire supply chain.

The four pillars of Industry 4.0 are detailed in the article:

• Intelligent Products: Allows for last-minute engineering changes. This enables more flexibility in catering to changing customer requirements during production. Constant communication throughout the process improves design, reduces costs, and increases customer satisfaction.
• Intelligent Assets: Allows for capturing and leveraging data. Digital twins help to analyse, monitor, optimise, and maintain physical assets. It creates balance between availability, asset health, and profitability. These intelligent assets are moving from responsive to predictive, which prevents failing machinery, in turn leading to reduced costs and repairs.
• Intelligent Factories: Digital supply chain capabilities and greater connectivity increases shop floor visibility, agility of operations, and helps to identify process bottlenecks. Strict production lines are then transformed into flexible manufacturing cells.
• Empowered People: Empowering employees is key to long-term success. Despite increased automation, new operations and tasks will be created that require human decisions. Training individuals is vital.

The article concludes by recognising the pandemic as a disruptive function for evolution and change within the manufacturing industry. Businesses who digitise their processes and integrate Industry 4.0 techniques are in the best position currently, and will be post-COVID as well.

In the years since Vuzix Chief Executive Paul Travers studied computer and electrical engineering in the 1980s, there have been many paradigm shifts in technology. He believes that AR and smart glasses will create a profound shift, even “completely change the paradigm of the phone”.

Vuzix began with a focus on military use cases for AR, working with Six15 Technologies in 2014 to integrate AR technology with goggles for the Navy. Innovations for military clients are still being developed now, but the Vuzix NGSG is focused on enterprise and consumer markets.

The hardware involved in the Vuzix NGSG includes binocular micro-LED projectors, with one of the highest density pixel arrays. This provides extremely bright images with low power demands and excellent contrast. Other features include:

• Noise-cancelling microphones
• Speakers integrated into the glasses’ temples
• Wireless communication with mobile devices
• Built-in LTE cellular option
• Potential future “advanced gesture control” (not yet confirmed by Travers)

Potential use cases for the Vuzix NGSG mentioned in the article include:

• Mapping: AR can give on-screen directions and other useful tags overlaid onto streets and buildings nearby
• Medical: During unfamiliar operations, doctors can get remote guidance from experts to support them
• Shared experiences: Family members can share a view of an event and watch it together

Despite limitless possible applications, AR, like every technology, requires early adopters to popularise it. In response to this, Vuzix is creating developer tools to make app development (or porting across existing apps) easier for users. Matt Margolis, Vuzix’s Director of Business Development and Strategic Relationships, states that porting a mobile app over to a smart glasses app doesn’t require much extra work, and maintains accessibility.

Travers believes that making smart glasses easy to wear in public will ultimately make the technology widely successful. The Vuzix NGSG are closer to this, and pricing is expected to be similar to current smartphones and smartwatches.

To conclude, Travers states that he is anticipating that smart glasses will really come to fruition in the next three years.

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

According to RealWear, Fugro were seeking a wearable solution for maintaining collaboration while reducing on-site visits. They soon chose RealWear’s technology after consulting partner VR Expert to support requirements for connectivity, safety, and ruggedness.

Since 2019, Fugro have adopted the HMT-1, gradually increasing the number following potential scale, user feedback, and connectivity and durability tests. VR Expert adapted their software to optimise settings based on current bandwidth and latency due to low connectivity in extreme weather conditions. After validation of the use case, VR Expert provided kits for Fugro with the RealWear headset in them, now to be found on almost every vessel.

Hannes Swiegers, Global Director Remote Operations and Support Services at Fugro, has said that they are “proud” of their teamwork with VR Expert and RealWear. Since the deployment, the following benefits have occurred:

• Reduced on-site visits; increased safety
• Optimised resources due to removal of travel
• Instant access to expertise via Remote Expert functionality; quicker operation

Sanjay Jhawar, President and Co-Founder of RealWear, has said that they appreciate the opportunity to work with Fugro, allowing for empowerment and elevation.

CEO of VR Expert, Tim Nijland, has also added that RealWear’s reliable HMT-1s enhanced the “vision to validation” with Fugro. The wearable solution is being used to “great effect” internationally.

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

One of their open architecture, cloud-based XR platforms leverages the following advantageous technologies: low-latency remote rendering, 3D Artificial Intelligence-based Spatial Mapping, and distributed computing. These features allow for high precision, high quality, and high performance in scalable immersive experiences. Seamless integration with any device or application makes it a cross-platform solution that reduces costs, increases revenue, and improves productivity.

During a combined 60 years of experience, co-founders Rishi Ranjan, Dijam Panigrahi and Venkat R. Dass have worked in building, deploying, and marketing leading technologies, including ones at AREA member Qualcomm. As a result of this work in supporting AR/VR applications, they were aware of how to enable high quality AR/VR experiences on any device. Their platforms have been supporting companies in construction, automotive, and aerospace since 2018.

What Can AR and MR Do?

• Assist computer-aided design capabilities
• Help engineers to compare correctness of a design faster
• Power real-time remote augmentation, allowing complex models to run on mobile devices
• Enable realistic product visualisation and remote collaboration
• Create a virtual environment for remote training, repair, and maintenance
• Assist product design by providing data on how, where, and when customers use the product

Panigrahi has said that AR/VR has become even more vital for business continuity, productivity, and efficiency due to the pandemic. The technology allows for remote collaboration, remote training, visualisation of construction vehicles, remote maintenance and repair, and remote customer support.

Benefits of Grid Raster’s Platform in Construction:

• High performance: supports large, high-fidelity AR/VR/MR environments without 3D asset optimisation, which saves money and time.
• Highly scalable: scales seamlessly based on usage, location, and asset.
• Highly secure: provides multi-level security involving access, authorisation, and encryption.
• Device agnostic: provides support across devices and offers multi/cross-platform support.
• API-based integration: easily integrates with CAD/CAM and 3D assets, allowing reuse of the latter.

Further benefits mentioned in the article include:

• Increased productivity
• Saving time and money
• Better sharing and collaboration
• Almost one-third of companies reported a 25% increase in productivity, with 61% seeing 20% cost savings (according to Grid Raster)
• 40% increase in productivity in manufacturing process, repair and maintenance
• Increased safety
• Increased accuracy, effectiveness, and efficiency

Many entry-level technicians can perform at expert level with AR-assisted instructions, which would usually take years to achieve. Despite initial reluctance to use the technology from more experienced engineers, once they begin, the value of AR/VR encourages them to continue using it.

Current challenges to overcome with integrating the technology include:

• Device display (e.g. resolution)
• Network bandwidth
• Connection quality

Panigrahi further states that cloud-based immersive experiences will be key for widespread AR/VR adoption in not only construction, but across most industries. Grid Raster will continue to push the boundaries of innovation.

The AREA seeks to receive proposals for a funded research project that will examine and capture in a report the current status of 5G in enterprise environments, assessments of the risks and opportunities of using 5G technologies for AR use cases, and areas for future research and potential investment for AREA members. The project will also deliver tables containing objective, vendor-neutral information about current component costs, product and service offerings, past and current trials, proof of concept projects and guidelines for AREA members. 

Organizations with relevant expertise in the research topic may respond to the invitation on or before 12 PM Eastern Daylight Time on February 10^th. 

Industry Context for the Research

Investments in 5G are fueled by the potential for new low-latency, high-throughput network technologies to reduce or remove barriers to implementation of new and powerful use cases. By providing connected devices and machines access to high performance computing and other limited and costly resources, 5G networks will significantly expand and lower the cost of use of powerful computing hardware and software, data sets and other services (e.g., privacy, security, localization and other artificial intelligence-based platforms). 

Telecommunications companies around the world are heavily promoting 5G technology for delivering AR for entertainment and other consumer-facing services. The 5G-based services will be provided by network operators, some of whom are partnering with AR device and software providers to offer solutions to enterprise customers.  

Managers of large enterprise IT organizations are aware of the emerging 5G networks and components, including 5G-ready wearable and mobile devices, but many questions remain to be answered prior to the introduction of these in an enterprise infrastructure.  Before AREA customer segment members begin testing AR over 5G in their facilities, they need deeper understanding of key concepts of 5G, and the requirements, opportunities or benefits 5G could bring.   

Before AREA provider segment members begin evaluating and planning for 5G-enabled product or services to offer to their customers, they must build out 5G expertise internally or partner with companies that have 5G offerings.  

Project Goal

The AREA seeks to provide its members with knowledge about the current status of AR and 5G for enterprise, and actionable information which members can use when planning their AR and 5G strategies. 

Fixed Fee Project

The AREA Research Committee budget for this project is $15,000. Organizations interested in conducting this research for the fixed fee are invited to submit proposals.  

More information

Full information on the project needs, desired outcomes and required components of a winning proposal, including a submission form, can be found here.

If you have any questions concerning this project and the AREA Research Committee, please send an email to the Research Committee.