Augmented reality gets ready for business

Virtual reality (VR) gets all the attention, because it promises consumers not only a whole new world, but many new worlds. By comparison, augmented reality (AR) is the poor relation. Yet, this is where we are likely to see the real evolution, product ranges and use cases emerging in the five years.

Ironically, AR may even save VR, as it allows for several levels of immersion, from basic text overlaid on whatever one is viewing in the real world, all the way through to near-total VR.

It is this versatility of AR that is seeing it invading industries, organisations and enterprises globally. From teaching anatomy in a class to performing surgery, from repairing an aircraft engine to in-vehicle navigation, the use cases are becoming well-established. And where there are business use cases, manufacturers and developers quickly fill in the gaps identified by users.

For this reason, an AR device is being developed by Lenovo, best known for its ThinkPad laptops and Yoga two-in-one laptop-tablet combination. At the Transform 2.0 conference hosted by the Lenovo Data Centre Group in New York this month, it revealed not only a headset, but also a computing device and a software platform. At first sight, it may even appear to be a VR headset. This means that it can cover the full spectrum of AR experiences.

“I don’t think there’s a super hard line between AR and VR,” said Christian Teismann, senior vice president and general manager of Lenovo Worldwide Enterprise Business, at the event. “If you think of the AR you put over real reality, you start with 1% virtual. When you get to 100%, it’s become VR.

“However, the use for VR is limited to experience. I don’t think for commercial applications VR has a lot of use cases, but the amount of AR overlaid on reality will vary a lot. In some cases, most reality will be augmented, in others only very little.”

Two great examples that encapsulate the issue is the use of augmented reality in cars versus its use in surgery.

“When you’re driving a car, how much augmented reality is reasonable?” asks Teismann. “It can only support you, as when your speed or turn-by-turn navigation is projected onto the windscreen in front of you. In other uses, AR becomes critical. Think of the scenario where a surgeon is doing microscopic surgery and is operating via a computer. The surgery is being done with laser technology, and you can no longer see inside the body in the same way as when you cut it open. As a result, most of the procedure will be augmented.”

Because the use cases of AR in commercial environments are so specific, he says, “It will never go to the entire extreme of virtual, because you lose the aspect of reality being part of the value proposition.”

For this reason, most VR is focused on the consumer space, and most of it is gaming or entertainment oriented.

Lenovo has not yet revealed the specifications of the AR device it is developing, but Teismann lifted the lid on the technology behind it.

“You can expect that we will havean  end-to-end AR solution during the course of next year, and it will include a headset device, computing device and software platform on which use cases can run. It will be, to a certain degree, wireless, because you have to be able to take it to the use case, rather than bring the use case to the device.

“The new 5G technology that is being rolled out by telecommunications operators over the next few years will be a very important enabler, because the data volume you consume in AR is immense. You have to recompute the AR model on a real-time basis, all the time, wirelessly. With VR you only need your position relative to the device, With AR you need to recompute your position in the real world. So you need computing capability that is in the device and computing capability that comes from the background.”

A classic business use case that is being sold to airports and aircraft maintenance companies promises to save millions in the cost of human skills.

“Let’s say you want to do maintenance on a jet engine. Today, you as a maintenance engineer have to be certified on a specific jet engine. If you think of the amount of jet engines out there, its very hard to keep up with certification, so many airports cannot service jet engines because there is no one certification. They have to fly people out, at huge cost.

“In future, it will be normal that engineers who don’t have specific certification will be able to do on-site work with AR overlaid onto the engine, assisted by artificial intelligence in the back-end telling them what to do. If the engine is enabled for the Internet of Things, the engineers will also be getting data from engine. You could also have a certified engineer assisting remotely.

“It re-engineers the entire value chain of the service industry. We will see a lot of AR in retailer logistics, constantly re-tooling logistic chains. Even as a consumer, you will be able to do AR-assisted repairs on household devices yourself. However, it will be initially for companies rather than consumers.”

The thinking behind many of these examples is so well-established, commentators tend to think that AR has run out of ideas. Teismann points out that most companies are trying to solve the same problems, but the, err, reality is that the technology is finally catching up to the use cases.

“The use cases are not changing that much at the moment, but what is starting to mature is the technology. I believe the form factor itself was not ideal for long-term usage. It was too heavy. The compute power didn’t compute real-time enough. With technology advancing, these things are maturing. We are starting to come to a point where wide-scale adoption is more likely.”

A further issue is that the use cases are often too complicated, hence Lenovo’s decision to focus not only on the hardware, but also a software platform that can be roped in to build use cases in an “object-oriented” way. This means that it becomes more useful for individual companies rather than on a broad scale, but simultaneously more scalable in how it can be run in a specific environment.

Most important, Lenovo and other AR developers are learning from experience.

“It also requires the willingness of customers to really pilot these things. You don’t get it right from day one, because you learn from every customer use case. The first implementation is never perfect, the second is better, and the third becomes mature and can be replicated on a more scalable basis.”

The industry is moving from the second to the third phase. The timeframe, says Teismann, is between 5 and 10 years, but some industries will move much faster, because the return on investment is so much higher.

“If you think of a complex thing like an oil platform, to fly someone out to fix something because no one else knows how, if someone has an AR device on the oil platform, a normal mechanic can do it with remote guidance. The use case immediately pays off. In car workshops, like with BMW engineers for example, it will take longer to pay off.”

The Lenovo headset won’t be sold off the shelves, but will be brought in by what the company refers to as lead customers, many of which will be global organisations like aircraft companies.

The headset itself, however, will be only part of a solution. The future of AR will be very specific to the reality you want to repair or explore.

• Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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