TMI: Stop Oversharing Your Augmented Reality Models

For the past year, PTC Creo has made it easy to turn any 3D model into an AR experience. Click a few buttons in Creo, generate a ThingMark, and invite all your colleagues and friends to experience the model overlaid in real world settings.

An augmented reality experience triggered by pointing an app on aniPad at a ThingMark.

Once your friends and colleagues had the ThingMark, they could then show their friends and colleagues your model too. The new technology wowed everybody who saw it. And it made activities like design reviews a breeze.

But it also presented a new challenge, especially for security-minded companies. Who was seeing your model? And who were they showing it to?

While it’s true that an augmented reality experience doesn’t have the detailed information you would find in a CAD model, there may still be plenty of reasons to limit who sees your ideas, and when.

Augmented Reality with IoT data shown in real time.

“In some fields, research and development (R&D) costs are escalating, while market opportunities are shrinking … theft of a competitor’s trade secret might promise a more certain path to quick profit,” warned Deloitte in a 2016 article. 

Nothing is more dispiriting than seeing your ideas in someone else’s catalog or web site. Can the information in your AR experiences end up with careless or unethical competitors?

The good news is that you don’t have to find out. You can take steps to prevent losing your ideas when you pass around models via AR. That’s because we’ve added a new extension to Creo Parametric, one that makes augmented reality experiences easier to share, without oversharing.

Creo AR Design Share—Augmented Reality with Boundaries

Creo AR Design Share expands on the capabilities already in your Creo product design software, giving you full control over accessibility to your AR experiences.

 Here’s how it works. Instead of a ThingMark, you generate a link that others can use to view your model in the ThingWorx View App. Use Creo AR Design Share to specify who can see the experience presented by the link. Then simply email the link.

Imagine sending AR experiences out to suppliers to get feedback on your design. Then when you’ve chosen a certain supplier that you want to move forward with, you can simply remove the others from the viewing list.

It’s that easy. So while Creo AR Design Share places boundaries on who sees your work, the truth is you will likely be sharing your designs with more stakeholders, since you don’t have to worry as much about the experience falling into the wrong hands.

What’s Your AR Strategy?

From product design strategies and well beyond, AR has already begun to change the face of how players in industries everywhere create value. And now it’s more secure than ever.

Learn more about the choices companies like yours are making to keep their competitive edge as AR becomes an increasingly central part of their product strategy. Download “A Manager’s Guide to Augmented Reality,” published recently in the Harvard Business Review.

Pioneering organizations, including Amazon, General Electric, Mayo Clinic, and the U.S. Navy, are already seeing a stunning impact on quality, productivity, and other measures of performance. This article provides a road map for how companies should deploy AR and lays out the critical choices companies will face in integrating AR into strategy and implementing it.

Click here to download your copy today.