A talk from the Work Track at AWE USA 2017 - the largest conference for AR+VR in Santa Clara, California May 31- June 2, 2017.
Brian Ballard (Upskill): Augmenting the Capabilities of Industrial Workers at Scale
In the new Industry 4.0 world, operational leaders need more visibility into their business, greater agility to adapt to changing customer requirements, and a workforce capable of working in harmony with new technologies bringing data and smart, connected equipment to the production environment. Join this session to learn how augmented reality is scaling in industrial settings and how wearables are providing the human interface to industrial IoT with new and compelling results.
http://AugmentedWorldExpo.com
13. Brian Ballard - brian@upskill.io
The connected workforce is the future of work.
Editor's Notes
In the new Industry 4.0 world, operational leaders need more visibility into their business, greater agility to adapt to changing customer requirements, and a workforce capable of working in harmony with new technologies bringing data and smart, connected equipment to the production environment. Join this session to learn how augmented reality is scaling in industrial settings and how wearables are providing the human interface to industrial IoT with new and compelling results.
Thank you, Jay. Long time, no see 😉
Good afternoon AWE! As the co-founder of Upskill (you may have known us prior to our new names as APX Labs) this is my 4th AWE now. It has become a litmus test of the industry in many ways – and my how things have changes in AR, Mixed Reality, Wearables, Computer Vision. The world does not stand still between our annual pilgrimages to the San Jose Conference center do they?!
No they don’t – and the resultant progress has really contributed to the first adoptions of wearable augmented reality systems at scale for the enterprise. I was a bit worried that Augmented Reality at Scale was going to trigger this expectation
Some of the factors are obvious and tangible such as the steady march of hardware improvements. There are competitive factors amongst the customer or adopter base. There are proofs in the solution side that have spread across industries. No matter what the reason, progress has been the result. Today we have thousands of users – incredible progress though still shy of the goal of upskilling millions of the industrial workforce. But the journey we’ve been through with customers like Coke, Boeing, AMAT, J&J are fantastic lessons that we can share with the broader community to inform your own journey into Industry 4.0.
Is this our future?
Populism is asking the question, will we be replaced by robots?
I bring up AR it evokes a different image doesn’t it.
Let me start by providing a market view of the motivators of change. Without these, you are pushing technology without a purpose.
Industry 4.0 is a term we hear every day amongst our customer leaders. It is digitalization manifest in industrial processes from design to manufacture to service. The investment that it has taken to get here is untold millions at even the smallest companies, Billions for some of our premier customers. But digitization hits a moat between the computer and much of the workforce. This is a known problem. Companies struggle showing real time mobility vs. a work wiki reference. We’re not future-seers, wearables are an obvious solution to the human interface problem in Industry 4.0. Great wearables did not happen overnight. (more on that in a moment). Companies on the forefront of this technology generally follow these KPIs.
Productivity
First time quality
More uptime
Faster training.
We have seen these “motivators” for adoption both implicitely aimed at being more competitive and being explicitly driven by a competive need.
Examples:
When I was on stage last year we had a great customer example from Boeing where they showed a 30% productivity increase. This is a company with 8,000 planes on backorder. It’s about increasing production and the ability to shift resources around to solve new bottlenecks.
Assume your company hits similar results. Here’s an example of the impact at scale.
As a company that has focused exclusively on enterprise AR for nearly a decade, we’re very attuned to the rhythms of the business market. For years, businesses have been kicking the tires of various kinds of AR and wearables, but the path from pilot test to production has been slow. This year, we saw that shift decisively. Mainstream, household-name companies, from Boeing to Bayer to Coca-Cola (and I’m only to C in the alphabet there) are moving forward with full deployments of AR for front-line workers.
Chapter 2. Scale via hardware maturity.
Enterprise customers do not scale on first generation hardware. Thankfully the hardware market has a healthy number of 2nd, 3rd, sometimes 4th generation hardware players. Many with household names behind them like Epson, Microsoft, Intel, Sony.
Part of our approach at Upskill is to optimize industrial solutions for the most reliable and available hardware options that can meet the needs of our customers. For many this means head-mounted video displays for presenting 2D content, rather than full-on immersive, mixed reality gear like Hololens.
We don’t want to neglect exciting emerging technologies – we (Upskill) are investing a significant amount of our available capital at making sure we can deliver on these formfactors, but we believe the vast majority of value in industrial use-cases comes from providing a hands-free interface for front-line workers to access, capture and share information – capabilities that are already provided by today’s hardware.
Despite the advantages, the shortcomings of early wearables and head mounted displays were keeping a lot of customers on the sidelines. – Who in the room got into the game as a Glass Explorer.
This year, we’ve seen the arrival of second generation hardware at scale, and that’s helping tremendously. The new hardware coming out now is more stable, more wearable. The sensors are better. The voice recognition technology has improved. Battery life is better and costs are coming down. We see the enterprise 2D glanceable hardware stabilizing around $1k a piece for the near term and immersive costs settling down in 2018 (price TBD but with a little more variability due to significant sensor payload differences).
The bottom line is that now that this fundamental requirement _ HW that works _ has stabilized, we see customers actually able to scale to hundreds or thousands of users per use case without procurement organizations standing in the way of ROI.
That makes it more attractive for customers to deploy wearable solutions at scale, which is where the ROI benefits really start to add up
Chapter 3: Upskill’s View of the Market at Scale:
An ability to scale a solution, corresponds directly to your confidence in a solution to equal your motivation in solving the problem. Now, when I was on this stage last year, I was CEO of APX Labs. In January, we renamed the company Upskill to better reflect our value to customers and market positioning . The market forces in Industry 4.0, are driving a global examination of how technology is being implemented across industries. We see evidence of companies looking at the new industrial definition including the workforce, not just their capital equipment. It’s not enough to just invest in robots, data and smart equipment - you need people with the skills to use those technologies day-to-day
Investing in AR technologies means investing in people. It not only keeps current workers productive and relevant as things change around them, but it also makes companies attractive to young talent.
When you invest in your people, the results are real. We insist on measuring the improvements our customers experience from deploying our products, starting from a baseline and quantifying gains in productivity, quality and speed . Love this positioning and tieing it back to the same audience
Good spot to show an A/B video
As a side note, it may actually be easier to scale wearable technology than get these videos through the approval chain to release in some cases. We’ve had some of these take more than a year to approve. (Think about that when you feel like you may be ahead of the competition. On that note, there are great examples of companies telling their own stories all through the remaining AWE days).
What we see is that manufacturers are some of the largest adopters at scale. The KPI are very easy to calculate. Most have significant digitization already done. IT is a stakeholder, enabler, and value add when done well. Can be complex assembly or material handing as the video shows.
(Full disclosure, both GE and Boeing are major investors in Upskill )
Field Service.
We see massive adoption in Field Service as both a differntiator to the end customer but also as a driver to improve the bottom line.
Thousands of users despite being slightly harder to quantify.
Opportunity cost of not implementing is going up due to labor retention, travel costs, uptime costs in lean margins.
We were also able to acquire one of our largest competitors in a deal that just closed last month. That not only improves our technology capabilities, but gives us access to thousands of useful field deployments and everything that they’ve learned from their customers to inform our efforts going forward .
We are knee deep in this space and these are the investments we are making to capture the opportunity that our customers see
2016-2017 saw a lot of momentum and consolidation beneath the surface. Next year, that’s going to explode into the open as the broader business world starts to see what today’s adopters of AR are now able to do
We expect our customers will be able to use their productivity gains to lower their cost of production, winning market share away from competitors – driven by those that adopt at slace. We all know how painful and expensive it can be to win new business or win back a customer after losing out. That will serve as a wake-up call that it’s time to get serious.
Companies who expect automation to reduce the need for skilled workers are also in for a surprise. Yes, the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs are going away - and that’s a good thing. But how prepared are companies to recruit talent for next-generation manufacturing jobs, or reposition their existing workers for new, higher-skilled roles? We believe AR technology holds some answers for this challenge, and increasingly, customers agree.
Finally, the promise of fully-immersive AR and mixed reality is getting closer every day. Hardware is improving, and we’re working with vendors to make sure their offerings can support the real-world needs of manufacturing and industry as well as the high-end design and simulation scenarios. This will scale in parallel, not in place of heads up display (monocular) glasses.
The main issue now is that developing content for these new platforms is still prohibitively expensive relative to the small market opportunity. Because we focus on the platform and software, we’re looking at ways to help companies present their existing content on whatever hardware they choose. We think in the end, that is a sustainable approach regardless of how slowly or quickly next-generation devices take hold.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with a couple of main takeaways:
Industrial AR is here today and working hard in mainstream companies around the world. It may not look like the full immersive version that is promised for the future, but it is what real businesses need to realize big improvements in productivity that’s making them more competitive.
People matter. The disruptions in the industrial workforce over the past decade have had social, economic and political consequences. Underinvesting in the skills of front-line workers has been one of the factors driving this trend. AR in industry can help restore some of the balance, by helping people forge more valuable careers in manufacturing and other hands-on jobs and helping organizations get more out of their other investments in data, automation and IoT.
We have reached critical mass and acceleration from this point forward is exponential. If you wait a year, you can end up four years behind your competitors. It’s time to get in the game.
