Meetings… loved and hated in equal parts. Some people seem to live for meetings and others to avoid them. Love them or hate them, they are not going away anytime soon, despite the current lockdowns and restrictions. They have just migrated into virtual meetings.

It turns out that we are missing out on a lot of unspoken interactions in today’s virtual settings. The list looks something like this:

• Facial expressions
• Gestures
• Paralinguistics
• Body language and posture
• Proxemics
• Eye gaze
• Haptics
• Appearance
• Artefacts

Some of these do translate to virtual video conferencing.

The power of face to face communcation is where the world of virtual immersive meetings comes into play, though it opens up design challenges as well as opportunities.

The author discusses these in the full blog, including the benefits and drawbacks of the hardware, software and usability:

“We believe that our Radical software solution offers better and more engaging solutions for users to interact with enterprise data sets. Immersive allows our customers to do things that they simply cannot do in the real world.”

Please contact  blogfeedback@mastersofpie.com if you’d like to understand more.

Read about Masters of Pie on their AREA member Profile

Read their blog in full, face to face meetings vs virtual meetings.

We are solving the problem

The Augumenta team develops wearables solutions that are used also for remote working and learning use cases. Our own working methods have enabled remote work since the very beginning of the company as the members are scattered around the globe in several locations and have always had the option of working from home. We have overcome challenges caused by different time zones and learned how to share and prioritize and support others in work tasks remotely.

And partly in the same boat

Having said that, we acknowledge that we face the same challenges as any other company during these times. We need to find new ways to collaborate with our customers on industrial augmented reality projects. Like most of you there, we cannot send our experts directly to customer locations to start projects and deliver solutions, and presenting your products entirely and only online is challenging. But we would like to encourage you, things can be done differently. There are ready-made solutions to support your experts in home offices and out there on the field.

How augmented reality and wearables can help?

In maintenance and repair, remote support with smartglasses and augmented reality have already a proven track record, and without a doubt helps save time and improve efficiency even during normal times. In manufacturing, the use cases expand into remote monitoring and machine control improving for example safety or uptime numbers. In training, smartglasses provide a tool for knowledge transfer and remote/independent learning. In fact, if there’s a need for any kind of support from an expert to another person working or learning in any field of industry, deploy smartglasses and AR apps.

Enhance the capabilities of local staff

With smartglasses and AR, you can improve the capabilities of workers to achieve things independently and even handle jobs that are not within their usual scope of tasks. This helps when there’s a shortage of skilled people available for certain tasks and experts can’t travel. Well-planned instructions and task lists with rich content that you can easily access while you work make practically any of us a semi-expert in many areas. If instructions don’t suffice a remote expert on the other side of a live video call that is sharing the same view gives you options to continue for example installation or repair projects that otherwise could significantly delay or not take place at all.

Learning-by-doing is the most efficient method of learning new tasks. Easy-to-use smartglasses apps and an experienced teacher giving remote advice is a highly efficient way of training new future experts, especially when you can’t be physically present in the same room. Smartglasses make a great tool for knowledge transfer. In simplest forms, they let an expert document the process of completing tasks correctly and share the result with less experienced colleagues.

With the right kind of devices and wearable apps accessing real-time IoT data, you can monitor and control processes and machines independent from your location. You don’t have to be in the control room or near a machine to get the alerts and notifications or the relevant values that you need to oversee a process. You can keep on working with other things/focus on fixing that one thing, and still rely on being notified of any upcoming issue requiring your attention. This makes a big difference if there’s a shortage of workforce and responsibilities need to be shared with utmost care so that those few capable can make sure all operations are running safely.

Today, the devices and applications can be controlled hands-free. This addresses also the problem of being able to work hygienically. You do not need to touch anything to get data in front of your eyes, control processes, or to document things. You can simply use gestures or voice to tell the device what to do. Tap air, not a keyboard.

In Augumenta, we’re used to dealing with industrial manufacturing, maintenance, and training people in those fields but the benefits of smartglasses and AR apply to any other industry area – including the medical field. Smartglasses can help medical staff, and not only now with their huge effort to take care of all the patients in the current situation, but also in the future by helping them to get the needed information in front of their eyes.

Changes in the way we work are here to stay

We cannot rely on going back to the old way of doing things once all of this is over, that’s for sure. There are lots of changes that stay and must stay permanent, how we work will affect the productivity and also sustainability of our operations. If you haven’t yet done it, now there’s no other option but to digitize operations.

We’d like to emphasize that there are tools and help available. We are most certainly having a bunch of applications that might help many of you and there’s quite a number of fellow AR companies with ready-made solutions available on the market. You can find a lot of information from the AREA organisation’s website.

Read Augumenta’s original article and their AREA member profile page. 

This is especially true for the Volvo Group, which had a nearly 260,000 order in-takes for trucks in 2018. To adapt to this changing landscape, Volvo is undertaking significant digital transformation and industry 4.0 initiatives, rethinking how it improves its physical processes, products, and people with current and emerging technologies.

The Challenge

Volvo prides itself on strategically differentiating its vehicles on quality and engineering excellence. In today’s rapidly changing market, customization has become the new normal. This presents new quality assurance challenges as product complexity and unique configurations increase in volume and rate of change.

“Volvo’s engines are very sophisticated with 4,500 different engine information variants for just one plant and 13,000 variants for the full plant for referencing,” explains Geoffrey Blanc, Manufacturing Technology Manager at Volvo.

Engine quality control and assurance in Volvo’s manufacturing plants are subject to rigorous quality checks, a task reserved for Volvo’s most experienced technicians. In one plant, each engine requires 40 checks, with 200 possible quality assurance (QA) variants, which must be completed at the QA station in only eight minutes.

Training new operators on these complex inspection procedures takes five weeks, which adds to the overall cost of quality. The laborious process is paper-based, not only creating extraneous cognitive load for the operators, but also mobilizing time and resources to update, print, and distribute QA materials regularly.

Indeed, the challenge is to establish and maintain a consistent data flow and systems connections to create operational efficiency across the value chain. “As we know, the trucking market is subject to significant variations. To us, flexibility in the plants means how fast we can implement new shifts in production to follow the market,” says Bertrand Felix, Manufacturing Innovation and Technology Manager, Volvo Group.

Volvo piloted an incumbent augmented reality (AR) provider to improve engine quality control processes but found the offering incapable of scaling and integrating across applications, processes, and desired use cases.

As they looked at alternate solutions, agile support for the increasing product complexity and custom configurations coming out of engineering and upstream manufacturing processes and scalability across global operations were critical requirements.

Read the full story on PTC’s website – case studies. 

Teleworking is only possible thanks to technology and it’s just one example of how people can continue to operate and communicate with no need to be in the same physical location. Other examples include the use of wearables to maintain machinery and other industrial assets. Should there be an issue, an operator can simply take a photo and send it directly to an expert at another location who can then provide instructions on how to fix it.

As well as enabling experts to be “in” many locations at once, using technology in this way also enables manufacturers to continue to call on the expertise of more experienced specialists for longer. Something that may be of real interest as governments raise the pension ages for workers. Not able – or not wishing – to be out physically in the field, older experts can continue to deliver support remotely.

The advent of smart glasses takes this to a whole new level. An operator wearing smart glasses can share what they see with an expert at a distance in an “I can see what you see” mode rather than via an image, enhancing the operation functionality of handsfree workers. This is exactly what PwC’s been working on for Signify along with Luxexcel, Open Manufacturing Campus, and AREA Members Proceedix and Iristick.

We’ve combined our expertise to deliver a smart glasses solution – with prescription lenses tailored to the user – for inspections on the shop floor, making the process voice-activated and entirely handsfree. The results of the project could have far-reaching implications not just for Signify, but for manufacturing firms around the world, and indeed elsewhere.

Let’s consider today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare professionals around the world are working around the clock to help save the lives of those impacted. And are putting themselves at risk of infection in the process. Alongside the risk of infection, their physical presence limits the number of patients they can treat as it takes time to move physically from one location to another.

Why not bring in smart glasses? The number of people who need to be physically present at a patient’s bedside could potentially be reduced. In this way, smart glasses provide a solid solution to enable more people to literally stay home and save lives. Already in China’s Zhejiang province, smart glasses with built-in thermal imaging capabilities are being used to screen the body temperatures of crowds to help identify COVID-19 cases in hundreds of people in minutes.

There can be little doubt that when we emerge on the other side of this crisis, the new normal we’re faced with will be very different to what we’ve left behind. And technology will play a leading role in what that new normal will look like. There remain questions around the use of smart glasses in terms of required IT infrastructure, insurance, legal concerns and more, but that shouldn’t prevent us from already considering their role in the future. We’ve adapted quickly to this crisis, perhaps it’s time to seize the opportunity to rethink the way we live and work and start designing that new normal already.

Protective face shields 3D printed for NHS workers https://www.amrc.co.uk/news/amrc-3d-prints-protective-face-shields-for-nhs-workers Joe Palmer, the Senior Design and Development Engineer who is leading the AMRC’s response, said the team has coordinated its efforts with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to ensure visors are being delivered to the local hospitals with the greatest need.

He said: “We know these visors are needed now and not in a few weeks’ time, so we’re really pleased that we were able to get almost 1,000 out of the door by Monday and into the hands of the frontline NHS workers who so desperately need them in order to stay protected as they battle this deadly virus to save lives.

Find out which manufacturers have been involved in the COVID19 ventilator challenge.  As part of the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult, the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) is closely involved in the discussions with Government to step up production of vital medical equipment, such as ventilators.

In addition to the Prime Minister’s briefing, the call has gone out from Government for anyone who supplies ventilator equipment to step forward. There is also a further challenge to the wider engineering and manufacturing community to fast-track a simpler ventilator system. We understand that five design companies, with a medical equipment track record, are now working on five specifications, with clinical input. These specifications will be reviewed by a group at PA Consulting, which is acting as project manager for this challenge. We understand that the five specifications will be down-selected to one or more key contenders. This will then be the opportunity for the engineering community to look at a specification.

Continue reading the story in full.

This Challenge is organized as an Industryhack FastTrack online process to help tackle the effects of COVID-19 both in terms of finding solutions for the host’s challenge quickly on one hand, but also to provide new assignments for the solver companies fast on the other.

Back in April we shared the news that AREA member and other companies Finwe and Wapice had been selected to take part in this challenge.

We can now share the news that Augumenta won the remote process challenge. You can read the full story about this on Augumenta’s website. 

This is one of the Digital Transformation processes that will lead the Russian company to the Industry 4.0 era, based on automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies.

Sibur chose Brochesia’s B View solution to empower its production processes, especially maintenance and support services through Augmented Reality and Remote Assistance.

As Alexander Leus, Sibur’s Head of Industry 4.0, commented: “Brochesia is helping us in our journey to digital transformation; they are a very trusted partner with a consolidated experience in AR software solutions and smart glasses. The Network Modernization-Digitalization project is just beginning but we can see the first positive outcomes: since we have adopted the B View solution we saved in time and money when doing activities in our production plants. Moreover we could decrease travels of the most experienced technicians as well as of our suppliers who are now able to give their advices remotely.

Finally we are exploring new possible applications of Brochesia software in the company. I’m sure they can give us the right tools to enhance our Digital Transformation, improving both our production process and business performance”.

In the face of a difficult epidemiological situation, the necessity of smart glasses and augmented reality at the enterprises has increased significantly. Regular repair works require an external examination, but the contractors cannot come from abroad right now, or they ought to wait for 2 weeks of quarantine. Due to the technology all external experts from abroad – Serbia, Italy, Korea, Belgium, France – and other regions of Russia can be brought aboard remotely

Read the original article on Chemical Engineering.

AR training simulator software are intended to train users for a certain role in a partially virtual environment. Trainees utilize the augmented reality in these solutions to learn the vital skills needed for a new job. These differ from virtual reality training simulators, as the latter provides training simulations to users in a completely immersive, virtual environment. By integrating 3D images into the real world using a phone or other mobile device with a camera, AR training simulators replicate real-life situations, which makes the learning experience more retainable and engaging.

Market Drivers include increasing Demand for AI-Based Applications.  Growing Interest of the Large Tech Companies in AR Training Simulation.  And thirdly, rising demand in Training and Skill Development by Various Companies to Train Employees for Certain Jobs.

Market Trends include High Adoption Of 3D visualization In Medical Sector and an upsurge in Demand from AI-based Applications in Retail and E-commerce Sector

Restraints revolve around Limited User Interface (UI) Affecting the Navigation Performance of AR Applications

Opportunities include Rising Expenditure in Training Simulation Technology. Technological Advancement and Development in the AR and Rising Adoption of the AI Technology

Current Challenges were found to be Low Adoption Rate due to Privacy Issues and Complexities in the Design and a lack of Skilled Working Professionals

Free Sample Report request link.

The business disruptions caused by the pandemic highlight an opportunity for augmented reality (AR) tech firms to step in and help organizations maintain operations.

AR’s ability to link the digital and physical worlds and empower real-world collaboration makes it primed to preserve enterprise operations in this time of need. Already, companies are racing to embrace AR technology — and we think we could see a lasting impact on enterprise AR adoption that extends beyond the pandemic.

Business Insider Intelligence spoke to Scott Montgomerie, cofounder and CEO of Scope AR, to discuss the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on Scope AR’s business and how the firm is strategizing in response.

Through our conversation, we discussed what has changed for Scope AR in the past few weeks, how companies such as telecoms are changing their business strategies amid the crisis, and what these changes mean for the enterprise AR industry in the long term.

Read the interview on Business Insider.

The digital curriculum components are available now for purchase by other utilities, with pricing and terms based on a co-marketing agreement.

MidAmerican is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy that serves 791,000 electric and 771,000 natural gas customers in Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota and Nebraska. As the cornerstone of a project to combine two time-based apprenticeship programs into a single, competency-based hybrid program, MidAmerican’s new digital curriculum is now being used to train all its gas technician apprentices.

Index AR Solutions worked side-by-side with MidAmerican trainers during the modernization effort, pairing AR and eBook learning tools to create a highly experiential learning platform with rich visual, auditory and tactile elements. Company operating standards and safety rules are also included for reference and contextually embedded into step-by-step procedures.

The curriculum is divided into four six-month phases built around interactive eBook multimedia learning experiences that are loaded on each apprentice’s work tablet for use during instructor-led classroom training, remote self-study and field work. Visual augmentations, 3D animations and detailed schematics teach apprentices how to identify key parts or complete common tasks. The augmentations also walk the apprentice through what PPE and tools are needed for each step and overlay critical information on to the area they are working.

Instructional videos are also embedded into the eBook modules, each one featuring MidAmerican’s own represented workforce. The videos emphasize the importance of safety and commitment to customer service – with seasoned workers who share wisdom and real-world stories from the field.

“Backed by the AR apps, videos and other rich content, the eBooks have become a valuable repository of our workforce’s knowledge, while also training and developing our future journeymen,” said Mike Hoff, director of business optimization and innovation at MidAmerican Energy Company.

MidAmerican expects to also benefit from the portability of the digital curriculum. Since content is downloaded to their company-issued Apple iPads, apprentices engage the material for training or field reference immediately. Training initiatives now take place consistently across geographically distributed teams, even in the event of business disruptions.

“Index is proud to work with innovative companies like MidAmerican who are using technology to chart the future of workforce education, and we look forward to partnering with other forward-thinking utilities who wish to augment their own workers – from the classroom to the field,” said Dan Arczynski, CEO, Index AR Solutions.

For more information, including product videos, data sheets, case studies and media coverage, please visit Index AR Solutions.