Some of the challenges addressed include keeping people engaged, dealing with opponents and a constantly changing hardware landscape, budget and financing, battery life and back-end system integration. This can be watched on their blog.

About the conference:

The Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit (EWTS) is an annual conference dedicated to the use of wearable technology for business and industrial applications. As the leading event for enterprise wearables, EWTS is where enterprises go to innovate with the latest in wearable tech, including heads-up displays, AR/VR/MR, body- and wrist-worn devices, and even exoskeletons. The 6th annual EWTS will be held September 17-19, 2019 in Dallas, TX. More details, including agenda and early confirmed speakers, to come on the conference website.

This follows an earlier mention on the FCC website, having been approved for communications use in the United States.

Seen by MySmartPrice, the new version of the AR device is said to be coming with longer battery life and improved performance – the Qualcomm processor replacing the Intel Atom used in the original is likely the reason for that. It is also claimed that the new model will have a higher resolution camera module.

The exterior is unlikely to change much, however. It will look similar to the existing Enterprise Edition used by workers in the US.

There is no word on a possible launch date, nor if it will be considered for consumer release. But we’ll keep you up to date as and when we hear more. Maybe there’s life in the old AR goggles yet.”

“Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Department of Defense to this new area,” a Microsoft spokesman said in an emailed statement.

The US Army and the Israeli military have already used Microsoft’s HoloLens devices in training, but plans for live combat would be a significant step forward.

HoloLens is one of the leading consumer-grade headsets, but a large consumer market doesn’t yet exist; a video made for the European Patent Office this spring said it had sold about 50,000 devices.

He goes on to assert that this is part of the promise of augmented reality for corporate IT, and this vision is quickly coming to IT departments the world over. Augmented reality will be used across roughly 30 percent of large enterprises and by 25 percent of field service technicians by 2020, according to research by Gartner and IDC. Overall, the market for AR is expected to reach $547.2 billion by 2024.

There are five ways Augmented Reality is set to improve corporate IT:

1. Improving data visualization
2. Delivering real time data in the field
3. Providing easy remote access
4. Boosting employee training
5. Assisting with physical site planning

Airbus and Boeing (AREA member) both had booming 2017s in terms of deliveries and orders.

The world’s largest aerospace manufacturers – Airbus and Boeing – both had booming 2017s in terms of deliveries and orders.

Airbus received 1,109 orders and delivered 718 finished aircraft. Boeing received 912 orders but managed to deliver 763 finished aircraft (an industry record).

Yet, their backlog of orders continues to rise –7,265 for Airbus, and 5,864 for Boeing. The exponential growth in aerospace is happening at the same time that demand for lighter, more efficient aircraft has never been higher.

“OEMs are having to deliver an ever-increasing number of aircraft from their mostly existing and aging facilities,” noted Scharlock. “With Airbus and Boeing both targeting double-digital profit growth, we are seeing them invest heavily in new production systems and digitally-connected supply chains.

“Quality benchmarks have to be achieved right-first-time as they can’t afford to operate with high non-conformance rates; which requires complete control of production, materials, suppliers and processes.”

The forerunners of the global manufacturing race all demonstrate four characteristics, according to Scharlock:

End-to-end digital integration of their engineering across the value chain

Vertical integration and network manufacturing systems

Horizontal integration across their entire operation

Humans are at the centre, helping to shape and direct the value chain

Scharlock offered a case study with Airbus as a real-world example of this in action.

Working with Dassault Systèmes and the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University at the 3DEXPERIENCE Center Wichita, Airbus chose a project that could not only revolutionise a critical aircraft component for its business and that of its competitors, but also change the speed of Airbus product innovation.

Airbus sought to develop a prototype of a thrust reverser unit (TRU), a component that slows down an aircraft upon landing. It wanted to simplify the design and improve its efficiency in record time.

While this type of development project would normally take 18-24 months, Airbus set a goal to complete the work in a focused 90-day ‘sprint.’

Leveraging the Innovation Center allowed the team to take advantage of its unique capabilities, including one of the world’s largest flex caves, a cutting-edge Multi-Robotics Advanced Manufacturing (MRAM) cell, and robust additive manufacturing and reverse engineering capabilities.

Trained on using the full capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for three weeks, the team and multiple partners and suppliers worked concurrently to deliver the project in just 12 weeks.

Team members stayed in sync through a common project dashboard and conducted design reviews through the platform. In just 84 days, the joint team was able to accelerate new system development from concept to full-scale functioning prototype.

In the past, components went through cycles of physical testing and fine-tuning. With co-simulation, working on a single platform, and rapid prototyping, teams from across the globe could use the virtual world to collaborate together to ensure a finished product that came out right the first time.

“The Airbus TRU project provides a tangible example of what the industry renaissance can mean to the aerospace industry. This new age brings the benefits of new ways of inventing, learning, producing and trading that result in an acceleration of innovation which will transform the next century of flight,” concluded Scharlock.

To read the full article please see here.

Such heavy investment in the technology indicates real potential beyond entertainment, and there are some people looking deeper into AR and how to combine it with other emerging technologies. I spoke to three individuals, Daniel Spruce, Ryan Hooks and Adrian Leu, who are proving that AR is useful for far more than just Pokémon Go.

Programming virtually

As any technology becomes more accessible to the public, smaller projects emerge that bring a completely fresh perspective. After completing his masters in Computer Science, Daniel Spruce started programming for Stainless Games then moved to a business software company. Realizing that many of his tasks involved ‘boilerplate code’, and that the systems he was working with used different programming languages, Spruce started work on a system to align ‘concepts’ between languages to reduce time spent on repetitive code.

This language uses a virtual space to visualize concepts (commands such as ‘read’, objects such as ‘image’, and attributes like ‘size’) as ‘blobs’ in 3D space, so that these concepts can exist independently without being written into a program. ‘Think of a parcel tracking system,’ says Spruce, ‘at each stage of its journey it may go through several computer systems that each define the object “parcel” in a different language. What my system does is to assign a “blob” to the concept of “parcel”, so that each system is talking about the same thing, and the concept “parcel” still exists even when it is not coded in one particular system.’

Using AR and 3D gloves, users can then manipulate the blobs without having to understand different programming languages. When it is finished, Spruce sees this as a way to bring more people into programming and create huge efficiencies in digital processes. ‘Projects could be managed, produced and deployed by one person’, avoiding the back-and-forth that comes with building a programme to specifications and helping teams in the planning phase. ‘In a typical scrum meeting, you could have everyone wearing a headset and gloves moving tasks and projects around instead of looking at one monitor – you could make the top priorities fill the whole room, and throw the backlog into the carpark outside.’

Farming 4.0

Augmented reality is a great way to visualize complex ideas, like what all that code actually does, or how to cultivate plants in restricted conditions. One company with a view of a technological future is Plant Vision, who are aiming to create a decentralized ‘collaborative’ AI ledger for plant breeding & optimization. Using AR, each ‘master grower’ receives equity in the footage they annotate. Recorded in the RGB color spectrum, infrared for ‘early disease detection’ and ultraviolet for ‘flowering and pollination’, the growers then add this data to a digital ledger to collaboratively train the AI system, and they receive value over time as their data is put into commercial use.

Considering the company’s roots in the rapidly growing cannabis industryand the complex, valuable data that comes with it – ‘the dataset just for powdery mildew for cannabis will be worth billions a year’ – the ambitions of Plant Vision are certainly not stuck in the mud. Transferring experience from his first companies Isabel/Huxley, founder Ryan Hooks hopes to harness AR and AI to increase yields and motivate farmers around the world. ‘For vine crops like cannabis, tomatoes and cucumbers, a Dutch grower can get 500% more per square meter just by knowing how to take care of the plant, so augmentation has so much potential.’

Based at Wageningen University, the project is currently focused on making tools for plant scientists in the Netherlands. With expansion planned in 2019, Hooks intends to ‘bring multi-million dollar Digital Phenotyping into our pockets’ thanks to high-powered GPUs and Machine Learning capabilities inside the latest smartphones. ‘It’s not AR for AR’s sake, it’s a hands-free system for understanding plants via AI,’ says Hooks: ‘I see augmentation as a bridge to automation, as it will take about 10-20 years for robots to be affordable in many plant sectors – instead of a million dollar robot you could have 50+ augmented growers.’

Beyond the bandwagon

While the visual media industry may be getting a reputation for blatantly capitalising on AR, there is a large amount of research behind closed doors aiming to advance AR technology in general. Adrian Leu, CEO of Inition, talked to me about where AR is headed and the investment that is happening in the visual media industry to solve limitations of this technology. ‘Current headsets, like Magic Leap or Hololens, are concerned with one major aspect which is to convincingly align and display virtual objects onto the physical world. However, there is no cognitive correlation at the moment between those objects and the physical world.’

Leu calls this ‘ability to process the surrounding world’ contextual intelligence and argues that this represents the next stage of AR that can gather information from its environment and learn to ‘see’ and display more appropriate information. ‘One can imagine soon how a certain wearable could scan an environment and process it in the cloud,’ says Leu, combining AR with advanced AI to increase this contextual relevance by ‘feeding data from sensors that study how the physical world behaves and evolves.’ This kind of intelligent AR would be a more hardware-based route towards achieving real computer vision, a cornerstone of AI research, and ‘could have a major impact in applications like training, remote maintenance, and collaborative design.’

Augmented Reality may be the latest craze for the visual entertainment industry, and an exciting new technology for the tech giants to sink their teeth into, but as is often the case there are far more interesting things going on in the background. Whether used in individual projects to make programming more accessible, ambitious plant-rearing collaborative AI, or in promising research behind the silver screen, AR has a bold future ahead of it.

Key information from the press release includes:

• The programme was unveiled at AREA Member Huawei’s 9^thGlobal Mobile Broadband Forum in London
• It is backed by mobile operators including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, KT Corp., NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Telefónica, Telenor, TIM, Turkcell and Vodafone. Other industry partners including Huawei and HTC.
• The programme aims to encourage all parties to collaborate on accelerating the delivery and deployment of 5G cloud-based AR/VR services.

“Both VR and AR are disruptive forms of immersive multimedia that, combined with operator edge cloud and 5G connectivity, will transform the cost structures of the enterprise and entertainment fields,” commented Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA. “Mobile operators will play a key role in its development, but without a common approach and industry-wide collaboration we risk fragmenting the market from the beginning. The establishment of this forum will overcome this hurdle and ensure we can scale compelling solutions faster.”

The new forum aims to encourage knowledge sharing between members, as well as discussion about new business models including the development of a service reference architecture to avoid cost fragmentation. It will also focus on technical development areas including research into ultra-low latency codec compression, graphics processing unit (GPU) rendering in the cloud and virtualisation technologies, as well as the development of simplified interfaces so that developers can easily deploy services.

Read the full press release.

Based in Boulder, Colorado, Frustum offers patented desktop and cloud-based engineering software that enables designers and engineers to go beyond the limits of their personal experience by leveraging powerful AI capabilities that guide the discovery of high-performance, next-generation product designs.

“PTC is pushing the boundaries of innovation with this acquisition,” said Jim Heppelmann, President and CEO, PTC. “Creo is core to PTC’s overall strategy, and the embedded capabilities from ANSYS and, later, Frustum will elevate Creo to a leading position in the world of design and simulation. With breakthrough new technologies such as AR/VR, high-performance computing, IoT, AI, and additive manufacturing entering the picture, the CAD industry is going through a renaissance period, and PTC is committed to leading the way.”

Frustum complements PTC’s strategic relationship with ANSYS, which was announced at LiveWorx in June 2018, and will bring analysis upstream to the very start of the design process.

Read the full press release on their website.

The report organizes the AR Smart Glasses Market across the globe into distinct portion based on industry standards. It also distinguishes the market based on geographical regions.

AR Smart Glasses Market report analyzes the market at global and regional level. The AR Smart Glasses market focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with capacity, production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer. The market has been forecasted based on revenue, market share and growth rate from 2018 to 2025.

Key players in the report include Sony, Google, Microsoft, Epson, Toshiba, Qualcomm, Recon, Vuzix and Upskill, the last two of which are members of the AREA alliance.

Please note The AREA is not affiliated with any of the market report producers and very occasionally shares information that may be of interest to some of our wide and varied readership.

“While most shippers, brokers, carriers, vendors, and warehouse operators will agree that the logistics industry is awash in emerging technologies, Gartner said its study focuses only on those trends that have substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and could reach a tipping point over the next five years.”

Viewed through that prism, Gartner says the ten strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2019 are:

• Autonomous things (robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles will increasingly exhibit advanced behaviors that interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people)
• Augmented analytics (an area of augmented intelligence using machine learning (ML) instead of data scientists to automate the process of data preparation, insight generation, and insight visualization)
• AI-driven development (creating AI-enhanced solutions using predefined models delivered as a service, and assigning AI co-developers to help humans with application development projects)
• Digital twins (digital representations of real-world entities or systems that can help users apply analytics and rules to respond to business objectives)* Empowered edge (the collection and processing of data directly at the endpoint devices used by people or embedded in the world around us, instead of at centralized servers)
• Immersive experience (how conversational platforms such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) can change the way people perceive the digital world)
• Blockchain (a distributed ledger that can enable trust, provide transparency, and reduce friction across business ecosystems)
• Smart spaces (physical or digital environments in which humans and technology-enabled systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated and intelligent ways)
• Digital ethics and privacy (how peoples’ personal information is being used by organizations in both the public and private sectors)
• Quantum computing (a type of nonclassical computing that operates on the quantum state of subatomic particles and can handle problems too complex for traditional approaches or algorithms)

While Gartner identified these trends as general, industry-wide themes, each one could apply specifically to logistics in a range of ways, the firm said.

Specific examples are given to conclude the article, the original of which can be read here.