Production levels of the Vuzix Blade AR Smart Glasses continue to ramp with steadily improving yields; with management’s production target capacity of 2000 units per month expected to be achieved by the end of Q1.  As part of Vuzix’ expanding waveguide production capabilities, the Company will phase in additional production capacity during 2019 for OEM-related smart glasses and waveguide projects commensurate with increased unit demand from expected project customers.

“The Vuzix Blade received a great reception at CES 2019 with thousands of booth visitors that ranged from the C-Suite of major consumer brands and corporations to strategic partners from around the world,” said Paul Travers, President and CEO of Vuzix.

“The assortment of hands-on Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses demonstrations at CES 2019, including the ‘Day in the Life with Vuzix Blade’, provided an opportunity for attendees to understand how Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses can deliver content, alerts and information to consumers without taking their phones out of their pockets.

As a direct result of these CES demonstrations, some of the largest wireless carriers in the world across North America, Europe and Asiahave shown strong interest in deploying our waveguide and smart glass technologies and products for their wireless networks in the near future and see its ability to drive cellular services, including 5G, and provide a competitive advantage.”

In addition to ExxonMobil, new Contributing Members include Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, and Vuzix. The AREA has also welcomed seven organizations to its ranks of Startup members: Apprentice, Augumenta, HART Influencers, LogistiVIEW, Sarcos Robotics, ThirdEye Gen, and Threesixty Reality

“With each new member that joins, the AREA becomes a more diverse, resourceful, and valued organization,” said Mark Sage, AREA Executive Director. “Our activities and resources will be greatly enhanced by the expertise and insights of these forward-thinking enterprises. The AREA is focused on helping to reduce the barriers to AR adoption and helping to accelerate the enterprise AR ecosystem.”

The AREA’s membership benefits include access to high-quality, vendor-neutral content and participation in various programs to help reduce the adoption of AR within organizations, a research framework to address key challenges shared by all members, discounts for fee-based events, and more. Sponsor members have a direct role in shaping the rapidly expanding AR industry and demonstrate their companies’ leadership and commitment to improving workplace performance.

Those predictions in 2018 were the following:

1. Lower prices for AR hardware
2. Insights from data will be vital
3. AI and machine learning make AR better
4. Hardware becomes more powerful
5. Form factors will evolve

Part 2 – predictions for 2019

Full original article with 2019 predictions can be read here.  Part two of the two part series covers 5 new predictions on Augmented Reality in the coming year. Atheer also checks in with what analysts in the technology community are predicting as well.

1. There will be more change on the hardware front
2. Mobile first but not mobile only
3. Enterprise AR customers will go public
4. Data from AR projects will become even more important
5. AR in government

The concluding part of the article includes research from Garter, ABI Research and The IDC.

From an AREA viewpoint, we are hugely interested in prediction 3, enterprise AR customers will go public. Here are Atheer’s thoughts on the topic:

“This one is interesting. Over the last year, we have seen how many traditional industrial enterprise customers have wanted to stay in “stealth mode” about their work in piloting and experimenting with augmented reality solutions. The result has been that you see relatively few stories about named companies using AR to change the way they work.

The reasons these companies typically didn’t want to go public about their AR work was simple: they wanted to make sure that it worked and get internal buy-in before declaring to the world that they were committed to AR. In many cases, they also wanted to ensure that they didn’t give a heads-up to their competitors about the pioneering work they were doing.

We predict that in 2019, that will be flipped on its head. Companies will go from being shy about talking publicly about their AR work to wanting to shout it from the rooftops as their customers and investors become more and more aware of how AR has the potential to make a big difference in their business.

They will do so because those same customers and investors will demand it. Customers will want to know why they can’t benefit from the use of AR to meet their needs and investors will want to know why the company they are investing in doesn’t seem to have the same kind of commitment as the company’s competitors. And executives in the “C-suite” will also begin asking their teams “what are we doing in AR and when will it be ready to use”.

These are two examples of how AR, which uses codes to overlay virtual elements on real-world objects, is changing the way we do business—including for the talent development professional. To use AR, the user points their smartphone, glasses, or headset at an object; the AR-enabled device downloads information about the scanned object, which the user is able to control from a touchscreen, through gesture, or by voice. The many uses include accessing up-to-date instructions, viewing the steps to assemble a device, or working with others to solve puzzles or obtain new knowledge.

Tips on designing successful AR learning from the article are:

First, find a business case. As with any new development initiative, especially one that includes a fairly significant monetary cost, a strategic case is needed. It should be noted that not all AR programs require a large investment—some can be utilized with smartphones or tablets; that is, without headsets or glasses. Questions to think about: Do you want to use AR in your onboarding program, for example, to help show employees around the organization? Or, perhaps you want to use it in your healthcare setting, to train and reduce the number of vein sticks through AccuVein’s AR tool?

Pilot and determine production needs. As with other programs, piloting the AR learning initiative will help determine snags and challenges to the program before expanding to a larger audience. Many of AR’s costs are found during the initial production, so to get the biggest bang for the buck consider using AR in a program with evergreen content that can be used with a large group of employees.

Further, if opting for a use that allows learners to be hands-free—that is, via glasses or helmet—costs likely will be higher. Is there room in the budget for such an endeavor? You may need to start smaller.

Define learning goals. Having chosen the business case is a step in the process, but you still will need to determine the end goal. Is it performance support? Are you trying to enhance a manual, hands-on task?

Consult with IT. “Your organization may have security or data integrity policies in place that you’ll need to work around to experiment with the AR technology,” writes Richards. How will IT’s workload be affected by your intended AR initiative? Finally, both IT and the organization’s legal team will need to know what kind of learner data is being collected as part of the program.

Measure results and iterate. What will success look like? Will you collect data about time spent with the device? Or will success be quantified by how many users accessed the AR-enabled experience? Watching users, too, will help determine whether the program is as user-friendly as you’d like it to be. And giving new users a job aid instructing on how to use AR will be beneficial for you as well as the learners.

AR is becoming more mainstream, around us in our personal lives and, increasingly, in our places of business.

In this eBook, Augmented Reality for the Transportation and Logistics Industry, you’ll learn how to:

• Address the challenges facing the Transportation and Logistics industry
• Apply Augmented Reality to super charge your digitization efforts
• Transform the productivity, accuracy, and safety of your workforce
• Assess your needs and how to identify the usecases best suited to this transformation.

“Accurately calculating downtime should be a part of how you plan for Augmented Reality – and think about the return on an AR investment. It’s where AR can really make a huge, measurable, and repeatable difference to your bottom line.”

Read: Atheer’s AREA member profile

With panellists including:

• Coen Sanderink, Business Developer Digitale Infra, Heijmans
• Julio Cesar Bolivar Lopez, R&D IT Innovation Consultant, Bayer
• Jan Pflueger, Center of Competence for Augmented and Virtual Reality, Audi
• Mark Sage, Executive Director, The AREA

Moderated by Amy Peck, CEO, EndeavorVR

Key discussion points will include:

• Identifying business need: The what, why and how of using XR for a purpose
• Success in pitching, implementing and using XR as part of a wider business model
• Learning from real cases: Problems and solutions in XR adoption
• Measuring ROI – the hard and soft approach

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to hear about real life scenarios, anecdotes and advice, as well as get your pressing questions answered by the webinar panel.

It’s taking place on Tuesday 15th January at 2pm GMT – if you can’t join live, sign up now to receive the recordings later.

Consider this real-world example: Virtual training can eliminate risk in nuclear power plant operation. You would much rather have frontline employees make mistakes in a virtual training environment versus that of the real world where a mistake can be both costly and dangerous.

When businesses look to adopt immersive technology for internal training processes and procedures, they should first consider whether the training task will be easily replicated in a virtual environment. The virtual world should not only be easily replicated but should also offer ease of use for adoption with current VR headset controllers and button configurations. Hand gestures and motion control can be an issue if complex actions need to be taken in the corresponding real-world scenario.

The U.S. Army wanted to introduce a risk-free way to train troops on various elements of combat in the field and found that virtual and augmented reality offered a way to do so without causing any harm to soldiers. Microsoft announced a $480 million initiative to begin training U.S. military troops with augmented reality training scenarios to mimic complex and dangerous real-world situations.

Walmart is set to provide more than 100,000 HoloLens headsets in order to develop a unique integrated visual augmentation system, or IVAS. This is a monumental step forward for training programs with augmented reality as it pushes widespread adoption and will allow a huge audience in the U.S. Army to try out the hardware.

Another massive training initiative that was launched for virtual reality was undertaken by Walmart that is set to change the way employees train for their specific roles within a company. This is groundbreaking for employee training as it will showcase a unique way to roll out front-line employees using virtual reality and prepare them for high-stress scenarios like Black Friday.

Partnering with Oculus and Strivr, Walmart purchased 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to roll out a nationwide employee training program that is as unique as it is impressive. This is ushering in a new era of employee training that will allow the user to enter a virtual environment and learn various internal Walmart processes in an immersive and experiential way.

The training applications being used by Walmart have widespread appeal and I can easily see this being adopted by other retail giants who are looking at technology to be a meaningful tool for onboarding new employees in an immersive way.

Another unique use case comes from General Electric Healthcare, as it implemented virtual reality for technology management professionals. VR for HTM is being used to help train the next generation of health care professionals as there is an incumbent need for training the millennial generation that is set to replace the current status quo. Every year, GE trains over 8,000 professionals and saw a huge need for not only training but safety and procedure. VR offered a unique way to integrate cutting-edge technology into its training programs in order to make them more fulfilling and immersive.

Other health care facilities can learn from GE in how they are using technology for training important roles in various technical procedures. This further eliminates risk for the end user learning complex surgical procedures and improves learning efficiency as well as overall performance when in the field. An example of this would be wound care management, where doctors and nurses can learn proper procedures for effective application of bandages and dressings.

Business leaders can learn from how these Fortune 500s are adopting the technology in meaningful ways as they look to improve their own internal processes. Virtual and augmented reality offer unique ways to eliminate risk, increase organizational value, increase access while improving productivity and reduce overall cost. All these benefits can be realized if immersive technology is adopted properly and used in a meaningful way.

Some best practices to keep in mind when looking to implement VR/AR into business training programs include:

• Learn from your employee feedback:Make sure to have multiple iterations of your training programs in place and get feedback from front-line employees in order to optimize training elements so that you can maximize effectiveness.
• Stay up to date on the latest hardware:With immersive technology advancing at a blistering rate, it is important for internal IT teams to understand the technology and stay up to date on the latest hardware changes in order to get the most out of it.
• Look to implement multi-platform support:Having functionality for VR/AR is great, but you should be looking to have full cross-platform support for both mobile and the web as well. This will give you more accessibility and ease of access to promote training programs more effectively.

Overall, virtual and augmented reality training scenarios are only just starting to be realized in the commercial sense. With adoption from key businesses around the world, we can expect to see more enterprise adoption in 2019. Immersive technology offers a unique way to recreate any environment in real time that gives employers a new way to avoid costly and potentially dangerous training scenarios by moving them to a completely digital offering.

Occupations in fields like healthcare, the military, and nuclear power clearly benefit from the element of safety that AR developments provide. AR is a new way to access information, such as patient data or training, in the moment, while filtering algorithms prevent information overload—which helps military personnel focus on operations in fast-paced environments, for example.

AR provides a layer of information on top of what’s available to us as consumers, learners, and professionals in real life. At the same time, the technology and data we use to augment reality are influenced by the human component, getting smarter by detecting and adapting to emotions.

As reality becomes hyper-real, it is helpful to be aware of the ways we are already adopting and adapting to it.  Stephen asks, will you get real about AR before it surrounds you everywhere and all the time?

The author will be at ATD TechKnowledge 2019 for the session, Propel Productivity With Augmented Reality in Learning: Why It Works. We will explore where AR can enhance an existing learning program and how to develop a plan for incorporating AR solutions into your L&D strategy.

The enterprise sector has already made very real strides whilst other sectors play catch up.  In the past two years, enterprise AR has graduated from experimental tinkering to become a validated implementation that is very much now a permanent best practice for industrial operations.

In other words, if you are a leading corporation and you don’t already have AR looped into your business lines, congratulations, you are a dinosaur, particularly because it will be vital in leveraging the advantages of adjacent technologies like IoT. Last week, for instance, a report released by PTC and the Aberdeen Group stated that 67 percent of the enterprise AR users surveyed pair it specifically with IoT in order to conduct remote repairs.

Enterprise AR has gone mainstream

“This can come in both the form of task itemization as well as see-what-I-see remote expert guidance scenarios. Some technology elitist/purist might claim this isn’t “true” AR, but I think of it as existing on a spectrum; with this use case easier to deploy *and* capable of demonstrating value for a wide variety of organizations.” Nguyen said.

Take again the Capgemini “Augmented and Virtual Reality in Operations”report that I showcased in my article on enterprise VR, which details a number of use cases in which AR consistently drives higher productivity and efficiency levels by allowing companies to streamline workflows for a wide variety of manual tasks.

Boeing’s technicians use AR instructions for airplane wiring schematics in their field of view, allowing them to be hands-free, which reduces wiring production time by 25 percent and increases productivity by 40 percent.

Welsh Water uses an AR layer to present process-oriented information and instructions such as direction information for valves and switches, or ideal operating ranges for gauges and dials, which minimizes risk and informs the decision-making process.

Ford utilizes AR tech by allowing designers and engineers to dynamically peruse through digital designs and parts as if they were part of a physical vehicle, reducing the time to analyze designs to a matter of hours or minutes.

Siemens enables their employees to inspect circuit boards by augmenting their view and alerting them to various elements they could have missed, which has hiked quality up by 20 to 25 percent.

GE Transportation’s Global Services group leveraged AR to drastically increase the number of maintenance tasks per hour by 59 percent by allowing workers to view maintenance instructions and sign-off tasks when performing maintenance on locomotives.

The Challenges of Augmented Reality

However, developing and managing AR applications is not simple. Typically it requires companies to hire developers with specific programming expertise, which generates significant additional costs. New cloud technologies can provide a solution to this problem by lowering the barriers to entry to AR development.

The technology required to operate well-connected AR platforms also requires a combination of machines, data intelligence and product level. It is therefore critical to continuously iterate development, simulation, validation, management analyzing assets and feedback insights.

There are a growing number of examples of exciting AR applications in the context of Industry 4.0:

Internet of Things Data Visualization

With AR applications for IoT data visualization, employees can simply hold a mobile camera over a specific node on a machine to reveal real-time data on its operations, such as temperature, electricity flow and power levels—thus increasing work efficiency and making diagnosis of problems easier.

AR Manuals

Vehicle manufacturers are already providing car owners with AR manuals for minor repairs and maintenance. Instead of thick paper manuals, users can access visualized graphic information about their vehicle using a smartphone or tablet. The devices use AR to instantly detect car parts and label them in real time and then provide video instructions for repairs or explanations of how to use the various buttons on a car’s dashboard.

AR Remote Support

AR-based video calls using smart glasses and mobile devices are emerging as a means of improving communication between employees in various industries. The application can superimposeinstructions onto a worker’s field of vision, using real-time AR drawing, messaging, shared multimedia content and features that allow for instructions to be given remotely. This increases communication efficiency and reduces overall operation times, while improving the safety of procedures in hazardous environments where it is important to have two hands free.

Can Cloud Technology Lower the Barrier to Entry?

As the market grows, more technology will emerge and enhance current manufacturing practices. But developing and operating such technologies is not an easy task. Currently, there is a high barrier to entry for creating AR applications, as they must be designed by people with a comprehensive knowledge of software development. The top AR software development kits (SDK) belong to tech organizations that already possess a deep understanding of 3D application development.

Cloud technology can provide companies with a solution to this problem, in the form of an easy-to-use online platform that integrates various AR applications for industry.

The biggest advantage of the cloud-based solution is that enterprises can leverage AR technology expertise via software without introducing new infrastructure. That means there is no need to pay for expensive new hardware or AR development tools and no need to hire a team of developers.

Just as some companies have given ordinary people the tools to create websites without prior coding expertise, cloud platforms will eliminate the entry barriers for AR application development and expand the target user base to include general designers or marketers without knowledge of programming languages.

Once the software is installed, cloud platforms will enable users to easily manage and modify a company’s AR applications online, using drag-and-drop interfaces and a comprehensive media content library. Such technology has the potential to completely convert the developer-oriented AR SDK ecosystem into a SaaS AR platform, providing a holistic AR experience with subscription-based software on the cloud.

Staying Ahead of the Game

As Industry 4.0 technologies accelerate production lines and enhance company-consumer interactions, keeping up to speed with new developments in AR will be pivotal to remaining competitive in the manufacturing industry.

Using cloud platforms, companies can simultaneously increase production efficiency while reducing overhead associated with developing the latest technologies. The cloud thus represents a powerful tool for staying ahead of the game and remaining at the forefront of innovation. We are without a doubt in the process of a major industrial transformation. Now is the time for companies to put in place the necessary structures to take advantage of it.

The AREA has resources on barriers to entry in enterprise AR.

AREA Security Committee Webinar – Overcoming Barriers to AR Project Implementation: A Security Perspective

AWE Europe 2018: Latest AREA Research & How its Reducing Barriers to AR Adoption