The group, led by first author Dr. Fatih Incekara from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, converted MRI scans of brain tumor patients into holograms and then overlaid these holograms directly onto the head of each patient using a type of augmented reality technology known as mixed reality. This allowed clinicians to visualize the brain and tumor of each patient right before surgery.

“This new technology proved to be pretty accurate when compared with the neuronavigation system,” Incekara told AuntMinnieEurope.com. “And surgeons reported an improved focus during surgery.”

Tumor localization

In recent decades, image-guided navigation technologies have proved highly practical and effective for use in complex neurosurgeries such as brain tumor removal, the authors noted. Current neuronavigation methods using these tools, however, are impeded by long setup times and require clinicians to repeatedly shift their gaze back and forth between 2D images on a screen and the patient.

Seeking to find a more intuitive way to plan tumor surgery, Incekara and colleagues turned to mixed reality technology — a variation of augmented reality that allows users to see and interact with virtual objects and their actual surroundings. They tested the feasibility of this approach in presurgical planning for the removal of brain tumors from 25 patients at their institution.

The group began by acquiring and then segmenting brain MRI scans of the patients. Next, they reconstructed 3D virtual models of the brain tumors with open-source software (Meshmixer, Autodesk) and used 3D-modeling software (Verto Studio) to make these virtual models compatible for use in a mixed reality device (Hololens, Microsoft).

Wearing a HoloLens headset, the neurosurgeons were able to merge the hologram of the patient’s brain and tumor with the physical head of the patient. This enabled them to determine the location of tumors and then mark the center and border of each tumor directly on the patient’s head. For comparison, the surgical team marked the center and border of the tumors on the patient’s head again, but this time using the standard neuronavigation method. They eventually removed the brain tumors based on measurements from the standard method.

Overall, the holograms of the tumor aligned well with the borders of the actual tumor. The clinicians were able to locate tumors using the mixed reality technique as precisely as they did with the conventional neuronavigation method in nine of the 25 patients (36%). The median deviation between the two techniques was 0.4 cm for the rest of the cases.

Furthermore, the surgeons claimed that using the mixed reality device during the operation enhanced their ergonomics, their understanding of the relationship between the tumor and the brain, and their attention and focus on the patient.

The AR Management Platform is a new category of enterprise software aimed at meeting the biggest challenges facing business today, with the goal of empowering the 2.7 billion deskless workers that have been traditionally underserved by technology solutions. It is aimed squarely at helping enterprises tackle the velocity of business, product and technology change, the opportunities and challenges of advances in connectivity, the scarcity of resources and talent they face as well as the massive complexity of running large, at-scale operations.

Atheer says the key to meeting all of these challenges lies in technologies that empower frontline industrial workers with appropriate digital solutions. According to a recent study by Emergent Capital, the majority of the world’s workforce (in industries such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture) are the 2.7 billion “deskless” workers who have been “forgotten and overlooked by technology providers”.

In a new White Paper accompanying today’s announcement, Atheer underscores the vital role that an AR Management Platform can play in meeting the needs of these forgotten workers and how meeting their needs will provide the opportunity for a fundamental shift in the way industry works.

“Augmented Reality (AR) provides the answer to empowering that huge swath of the global workforce with a technology that will dramatically increase what they are able to accomplish at work – and improve the way they do so,” suggest the authors of the new White Paper (Bobby Yazdani, chairman of the board of Atheer, and Sanjog Gad, CEO of Atheer). “The new Augmented Reality Management Platform offers the promise of providing every member of the workforce with relevant, contextual, personalized information and guidance from across the enterprise into their field of view in a seamless, hands-free, intuitive manner that transforms the way they work.”

The AR Management Platform is also welcomed by industry analyst firm Aragon Research. “The Augmented Reality Management Platform, as pioneered by Atheer, marks an important milestone for Augmented Reality in the enterprise,” said Jim Lundy, Founder and CEO at Aragon Research.  “Aragon believes that the advent of the Augmented Reality Management Platform (ARMP) will truly transform how enterprises – and the supply chains that work with them – run their business and support their workforces.”

Atheer CEO Sanjog Gad explained that this new platform definition is fundamental to the future development of Atheer. “The AR Management Platform is our guiding star,” he said. “We believe it offers so much promise and will be so vital to empowering the vast majority of the world’s industrial enterprises that we are making major investments in every part of our company to realize the full potential of this new software category. We can deliver many elements of that vision today and, with our own ongoing close collaboration with partners and customers, have dedicated ourselves to realizing its full potential.”

There are eight pillars to an AR Management Platform. It is device-agnostic, supports natural interactions, offers real-time ‘see what I see’ video, audio and text-based collaboration, digital asset management, offers contextual awareness, a predictive experience, performance analytics and is enterprise-ready.

Read the full press release to find out how Atheer sees the full 8 pillars being implemented.

With the new technology, Colgate-Palmolive employees will be able to troubleshoot machinery while keeping their hands free to work and use their voice to engage with company subject matter experts (SMEs), equipment suppliers and manufacturing teams across sites for support and cross training.  In addition, Colgate-Palmolive plans to use the devices to retrieve and capture documents and video.

“Colgate-Palmolive tested RealWear HMT-1 through successful pilots in 8 locations and is now standardizing globally on this wearable device for our manufacturing operations,” said Warren Pruitt, VP Global Engineering at Colgate-Palmolive.  “Looking ahead, we see an opportunity to use this tool beyond the plant floor for improved performance and new efficiencies.”

“Colgate-Palmolive’s global deployment signifies that industrial wearable computing has crossed the chasm into mainstream manufacturing companies,” said Andy Lowery, RealWear CEO and cofounder. “This has been a textbook example of how to move with energy and purpose, from evaluation through pilot to global deployment.”

The commercial deployment will include Librestream Onsight Connect for remote mentoring and RealWear Foresight cloud platform for app deployment.

With remote teams becoming more common, being able to bring the team together into a shared space is key to ensuring effective communication and projects stay on track.

All platforms allow a user access to VOIP, movement around the scene, object interaction, recording and playback of action, changing of environmental conditions and the recording of task oriented metrics.

The VISIONxR framework can be used across many markets including enterprise, AEC, education, training, retail, gaming and entertainment.

There are some clear areas where AR would be beneficial to the industry. For example, with some processes involving hundreds of components being constructed into a precise and often constrained sequence, AR provides the opportunity for assembly instructions to be superimposed onto the worker’s field of vision for immediate access. This also means that workers wouldn’t need to rely on potentially out-of-date instructions as documents can be automatically updated when new versions become available.

Maintenance Matters

In addition to its use on the assembly line, one of AR’s biggest potential areas is its integration within maintenance programmes.

From very early on, AR can be used to train maintenance engineers on the environments that they will encounter. This is of particular benefit for projects in hazardous environments such as food and beverage manufacturing, pharmaceuticals or even remote environments such as oil rigs.

Where AR holds its maximum potential is through real-time data and information access. By using AR, maintenance teams can have direct access to equipment data or system errors through their digital view in order to repair and maximise efficiencies on any equipment they are working on. Being able to access and see a machine’s real-time status and data could unlock a wealth of valuable information, allowing for a truly predictive maintenance plan to be implemented.

Off-site Access

AR also opens up the potential for off-site staff to access the same view as the maintenance team on site. This has the potential to support multi-location, or global teams that have equipment or service experts that may not be easily accessible to help support maintenance processes, particularly in emergency or unplanned circumstances.

By enabling a ‘see-what-I-see’ view through the AR technology, engineers can look through the same view as the on-site technician who is performing the maintenance tasks. Linking up workers through voice calls would further ease this process, as the experts can communicate the required actions and be able to see and guide the on-site worker complete them in real-time view.

This has considerable cost saving implications as not all technicians would need to be trained in every piece of equipment or process before they can begin work. It opens the opportunity of true on-the-job learning as well as increasing the opportunity of skills and knowledge sharing across multiple sites, or even nations.

So, while AR and other mixed reality concepts are only just beginning to see their value in industrial and manufacturing sectors, the possibilities of what can be achieved by integrating them into everyday practice is about to make exciting leaps forward.

Upskill has been developing Skylight as an operating platform to work across all devices, regardless of the manufacturer, but company co-founder and CEO Brian Ballard sees something special with HoloLens. “What HoloLens does for certain types of experiences, is it actually opens up a lot more real estate to display information in a way that users can take advantage of,” Ballard explained.

He believes the Microsoft device fits well within the broader approach his company has been taking over the last several years to support the range of hardware on the market while developing solutions for hands-free and connected workforce concepts.

“This is about extending Skylight into the spatial computing environment making sure that the workflows, the collaboration, the connectivity is seamless across all of these different devices,” he told TechCrunch.

Microsoft itself just announced some new HoloLens use cases for its Dynamics 365 platform around remote assistance and 3D layout, use cases which play to the HoloLens strengths, but Ballard says his company is a partner with Microsoft, offering an enhanced, full-stack solution on top of what Microsoft is giving customers out of the box.

That is certainly something Microsoft’s Terry Farrell, director of product marketing for mixed reality at Microsoft recognizes and acknowledges. “As adoption of Microsoft HoloLens continues to rapidly increase in industrial settings, Skylight offers a software platform that is flexible and can scale to meet any number of applications well suited for mixed reality experiences,” he said in a statement.

That involves features like spatial content placement, which allows employees to work with digital content in HoloLens, while keeping their hands free to work in the real world. They enhance this with the ability to see multiple reference materials across multiple windows at the same time, something we are used to doing with a desktop computer, but not with a device on our faces like HoloLens. Finally, workers can use hand gestures and simple gazes to navigate in virtual space, directing applications or moving windows, as we are used to doing with keyboard or mouse.

Sanjog Gad joins Atheer to manage its hypergrowth , as the company gains significant traction with enterprise customers, doubles the size of its team, deepens its senior leadership bench, moves into new, larger offices in Santa Clara, California and expands into new markets in Europe, Latin America and South America.

Sanjog said he is excited by the huge opportunity Atheer has, to augment and transform enterprise business processes by leveraging industry’s first Augmented Reality Management Platform (ARMP), which was announced today. “Atheer is in a unique position, as no vendor has taken a step back and provided a blueprint to properly realize the promise of enterprise AR – and that’s what we are doing,” he added.

As Senior Vice President at enterprise software giant SAP, Sanjog was responsible for first ever cloud native Platform as a Service on Amazon Web Services – and all SaaS applications built on that platform.

Prior to SAP, he held senior positions at EMC, Microsoft, WebEx (where he was one of the early team members and responsible for leading development of the highly scalable and fault tolerant WebEx backbone) and Baan (where he was a founding member of the core engineering team). With this experience, Sanjog brings the insights and experience he has gained from working at the forefront of enabling a business-critical, cloud-based platform for enterprise customers. Sanjog also has successful start-up experience gained at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) and Fishbowl Marketing Analytics (acquired by a private equity firm).

“With his deep industry experience, keen understanding of the needs of the enterprise market and proven track record of leadership, Sanjog Gad is the right person to guide Atheer through its next stage of development and growth,” said Bobby Yadzani, chairman of the board of Atheer. “Sanjog pioneered the market for cloud enterprise applications during his time at SAP and drove the growth of development of enterprise collaboration company at WebEx., We are delighted to welcome him to Atheer.”

1. Training and assessment
2. Remote assistance
3. Data visualisation
4. Product design
5. Physical site planning
6. Organize your VR in SharePoint
7. Customer AR tools

The full original article can be read here.

Interview between John Hitch, for Industry Week and Don Busiek, Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy at PTC, on why they helped put together the comic.

JH: Who is this AR experience for?

DB: The next generation of manufacturers, the students and local community around manufacturing centers in the U.S. This AR experience will inspire young people by demonstrating that manufacturing in a smart connected world is filled with technology, advanced skills, and creativity, which all add up to great opportunity. AR will not only help improve manufacturing productivity, but it will also help drive an increased level of excitement about the manufacturing profession in general.

JH: What do you hope this AR experience does?

DB: Our hope is that the comic book provides an easily accessible path for students to better understand how these emerging technologies in AR, IIoT, and additive manufacturing, etc. are employed in modern manufacturing, as well as highlight different possible career paths that are available.

JH: How did you decide what message to drive home this year?

DB: According to a recent report from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, 80% of manufacturers currently indicate a moderate or serious shortage of qualified applicants. Specifically, they found that over the next decade 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will need to be filled and the skills gap is expected to result in 2 million of those jobs being unfilled. Knowledgeable workers are retiring and we simply do not have the next generation of manufacturing leaders in position to fill their place.

Our message this year is that augmented reality gives you super human powers in manufacturing. We really wanted to demonstrate that manufacturing in a smart connected world is filled with technology, advanced skills, and creativity.

JH: Why is Manufacturing Day so critical for manufacturers?

DB: Manufacturing Day serves as a means of inspiring the next generation to consider careers in manufacturing at a time when it is undergoing a digital transformation. The world of manufacturing is transforming, and technology is driving that process. Many modern manufacturing companies are at the cutting edge of new technologies like the Industrial Internet of Things, additive manufacturing/3D printing, artificial intelligence and analytics, and augmented reality. Manufacturing Day created an opportunity to expose many common misperceptions about manufacturing jobs and hopefully shrink that jobs gap.

JH: It combines so many emerging technologies, many that will be ubiquitous when the tweens who read this join the workforce. How do you think the factory of 2030 will look and what is the risk if we don’t cultivate the talent to operate it?

DB: The factory of 2030 will be dramatically more productive than the factories of today. With AR, IIoT, additive manufacturing, and digital technology platforms, both machines and human labor will be significantly more productive, and innovation will accelerate exponentially at 1/10th of the cost.

For example, unplanned downtime will be at record lows due to IoT enabled predictive maintenance. Factories will be paperless and workers will use AR to increase human productivity. The products produced will be directly aligned with consumers preferences due to IoT enabled integrations with consumer sources such as social media. Supply chains will be lean due to additive manufacturing. Engineers will collaborate on a smaller number of parts that will be printed rather than assembled.

Without the right talent, manufacturers will have difficulty keeping pace with competitors and risk becoming obsolete.

DB: In a world that is increasingly becoming virtual, we communicate via email or text, we play video games instead of sports, there is really something so gratifying about knowing what you work on helps create the physical products we use in our everyday life. I feel immensely proud when I tell my family that food they are eating, or the car we drive was produced using the industrial technology I work on. Manufacturing is where it is at.

When asked, “What areas do you see having the biggest need in the future?” Spangler replied:

“Workforce, workforce, workforce. SCMEP works with manufacturing companies of all sizes and industries around the state. The No. 1 issue is identifying and recruiting a sustainable workforce. Companies are now thinking of out-of-the-box solutions for how they recruit and retain their workforce. We see more companies moving towards a virtual/augmented reality training method to recruit younger workers, which in turn has a higher learning retention rate compared to traditional training methods.”

How SCMEP are attempting to help meet the future needs of the industry is vetting future needs of South Carolina’s manufacturers and identifying resources that will bring bottom- and top-line improvements to the manufacturing community. We are benchmarking what the top original equipment manufacturers around the globe are doing and determining what best practices/technologies can help small- to medium-size manufacturing companies in South Carolina. The main goal is to find resources at the right price to assist companies in adopting the technology.

Other topics discussed include the Upstate manufacturing community, the market conditions impacting manufacturers in the area in 2019. How they addressing the widening skills gap, funding sources and details of their competitiveness review.

View Original source article.