Essential Resources for Leaders Aiming to Drive Business Value with Augmented Reality

If you’re interested in implementing augmented reality (AR) in your enterprise, it’s for good reason. The emerging technology is showing incredible promise in industrial applications and there are many points of entry and use cases across the value chain.

One of the biggest reasons augmented reality is effective is because it enhances a business’s most powerful forces – its people. By empowering workers with digital capabilities through AR, organizations are increasing productivity and driving efficiency.

Our Industry Hotlist monthly newsletter recently highlighted a selection of articles about how businesses are capitalizing on AR capabilities – and how your organization can get started. Let’s take a look: 

The Must-Know Trends (and Stats) About AR in 2020

If you’re just starting your augmented reality journey, this article sets out the prevalent trends and the case for investment in 2020. Here are few of the highlights:

• Global spending in virtual and augmented reality for 2020 is forecasted to increase by nearly 80 percent year over year. Industrial organizations will continue to outpace AR consumer adoption as it relays essential information to front-line workers.
• Healthcare is poised for substantial growth (38 percent annually until 2025) as its usage becomes pervasive for surgeons in-practice and training to overlay visual alerts or helping nurses find patient veins.
• Headsets will continue on the trajectory of becoming increasingly powerful, mobile, and smaller, while 5G reducing latency will propel more seamless AR experiences.
• AR will also transform learning methods with new immersive content delivery forms for on-the-job training and other industrial use cases.

Bridging the Gap Between Humans and Machines

For many industrial companies, work is becoming a mix of tasks conducted by both human and machines where there is a growing need for collaboration between the two. Augmented reality will be the next-generation human-machine interface to contextualize these future human-machine workflows that now include physical and digital work information from a myriad of systems.

With cutting edge capabilities including kinetic AR and spatial programming, workers can interact with their physical environment and drive operational efficiencies like never before.

Two Compelling Industrial Applications for Augmented Reality

Training, Learning, and Development

People are pivotal assets on companies’ financial statements, yet how they develop skills is succumbed to outdated training methods. As macroeconomic trends including the aging workforce and looming skills gap ensue, organizations must view learning and skills development as an ongoing progression and less a checkmark on an HR competency sheet. Augmented reality provides a more cost-effective and impactful delivery mechanism throughout the learning lifecycle- from the training classroom to real-world in-situ job shadowing. This article lays out four AR use cases where the technology improving learning methods is driving key business outcomes in industrial companies today.

Augmented Reality at Work at Industrial Giant, Howden

The global industrial equipment provider Howden is placing customer-centricity as the foundation of its digital twin strategy. Augmented reality is the centerpiece of this digital transformation and unlocking value for training, safety, operate, and service use cases. Howden will continue to reshape its customer’s experience with its products and look to adopt AR across the value chain to do so.

Get Started with Building an Augmented Reality Strategy for Your Business

If you’re ready to think about potential implementation, this resource sets out a comprehensive how-to. One of the stumbling blocks with any emerging technology is identifying a tangible starting point and path forward. PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann poses 15 key strategic AR questions in a new online course, How to Build an Augmented Reality Strategy for Your Business.

The “AR Playbook” breaks down the technological considerations for developing an AR experience across strategy, content, and delivery. Whether it’s answering what AR hardware will be most impactful for the desired AR use cases or what format the content in the AR experience should be in, this playbook provides essential guidance to questions required to build your AR strategy.

Final Thoughts

Right now, businesses are generating compelling results with augmented reality - and there's even grater potential, particularly in the industrial space. Learn more about adoption and technology trends in our State of Industrial Augmented Reality report.