72% of Service Orgs See Value in Table-Top and Product-Overlay AR

During last week’s virtual event on creating augmented reality content for service organizations, we asked 137 attendees whether they saw more applicability for product-overlay AR or table-top AR.

Overwhelmingly, 72.8% of respondents said they saw use cases for both types of AR. Just under 5% said table-top AR was more relevant to their needs, and 22.9% said they believed product-overlay AR would be more useful for them.

Are service organizations ready for AR?

Seeing the value in a type of AR experience is one thing, but are organizations prepared to develop and deliver those experiences to technicians, customers, and whomever may want them?

Almost three-quarters (69.2%) of those who attended the virtual event said they currently use 3D CAD to create technical illustrations. There are two ways you could interpret that answer:

• Most organizations use 3D CAD tools to create 3D technical illustrations from scratch.
• Most organizations use 3D CAD models to automatically generate 3D technical illustrations.

Regardless of which interpretation you agree with, it’s still safe to say that most organizations have the resources needed to get started. The question is, is AR a serious pursuit?

Is AR in the pipeline?

Kind of, sort of. When asked if attendees were “actively driving or planning” AR initiatives for their service organizations:

• 28.3% said “Yes”
• 20.1% answered “No”
• 35.2% said they were planning to
• 16.4% didn’t know

These responses are expected. The technology has yet to mature. Company A and Company B may compete in the same industry, but the latter’s product-overlay AR experiences may look very different than the former’s. We won’t know which content works best until we can measure that content’s impact on first-time fix rates, mean time to repair, and other such metrics.

Watch Part One of last week’s virtual event on creating AR experiences for service organizations: