- Robust computer vision that allows experiences from the widest range of target types including objects, models, images, surfaces, multi-targets, cylinders, and VuMarks.
- Cross-platform development that supports Android and iOS ARkits
- Vuforia Fusion enables easy optimization of AR experiences across a range of devices
- Seamless integration with industry-leading complementary design and modelling applications
- Broad community of developers with deep Vuforia Engine experience
Evaluating potential Augmented Reality (AR) solutions for manufacturing can quickly become overwhelming when you consider testing out product trials and going over pricing details.
A new IDC Report, How AR Drives Real-World Gains in Service, Training, Sales & Marketing, and Manufacturing, states, “AR technology is here and now, and companies of all shapes and sizes are utilizing it to change the way work gets done and to drive better outcomes.”
This article talks about the top proven industrial Augmented Reality Solutions and exactly what they can do for your industry.
The most widely used platform for AR development: Vuforia Engine
Today, over half a million developers have chosen the advanced performance and cross-platform reach of Vuforia Engine, making it the most widely used platform for AR development on the planet.
Why is this considered to be the most flexible tool for AR development? Because it delivers robust and precise AR experiences in a variety of environments. This AR Engine is a powerful cross-platform software enabling branded AR experiences for both new and existing applications to be deployed in leading app stores.
It lets developers freely build branded AR experiences for new or existing applications and supports AR devices such as phones, tablets, headsets, and smart glasses across leading platforms to reach the largest audience.
By using Vuforia Engine, developers can easily add advanced computer vision functionality to Android, iOS, and UWP apps, to create AR experiences that realistically interact with objects and the environment.
The Vuforia Engine Library also contains technical documentation to help developers be successful as they create AR applications.
With Vuforia Engine, AR developers can harness best-in-class computer vision capabilities, to detect and launch a variety of target types. This AR engine also is equipped with broad support for leading modeling platforms and user applications.
Features and capabilities of Vuforia Engine
Vuforia Engine comes with many distinguishing features and capabilities. These include:
Discover all of the unique features of Vuforia Engine here.
What are Vuforia Engine applications used for?
Vuforia Engine AR applications are best used for:
- High-end production of custom AR applications
- Developing customer facing applications that require superior product values
- Experiences that require sophisticated and flexible target recognition
- Elevating brands with complementary apps
- Integration with industry-leading design and modeling application
The best AR Authoring Solution: Vuforia Studio
Vuforia Studio is an Augmented reality authoring solution that lets you quickly build scalable AR experiences. Vuforia Studio is an augmented reality authoring solution that helps you rapidly build AR experiences.
Vuforia Studio enables efficient, cost-effective authoring of industrial AR without the need for in-depth programming or skilled programmers.
This AR solution helps designers, engineers, and technical publication end users author and publish scalable AR experiences that transform manufacturing, service, and training processes.
You can now experience features from the tool that have a robust and visual interface – easy for design file importing and ubiquitous viewer support.
How does Vuforia Studio work?
Vuforia Studio is a drag-and-drop authoring environment that enables industrial content creators to use existing 3D CAD and animated sequences.
This AR authoring tool leverages real-time IoT and business systems data and allows users to access and view experiences from a single app.
Its simple, easy-to-use drag and drop interface allows content creators with no prior coding knowledge to get up and running quickly.
Vuforia Studio features and capabilities
Distinguishing AR features and capabilities that come with Vuforia Studio include:
- Visual authoring environment
- Easily import CAD and animated sequences
- Native support for IoT data
- Scales to support global AR deployments
- Certified support for hosting and on-premise deployments
- Powerful spatial and model tracking
- Out-of-the box support for mobile and head worn devices, including Microsoft HoloLens and HoloLens 2
What are Vuforia Studio applications used for?
Vuforia Studio is best used for:
- 3D digital content overlaid on real-world equipment to provide contextual knowledge
- Rapid development of immersive training and instruction content
- Reusing existing CAD models and sequences to create step-by-step work instructions
- Visualizing real-time IoT data to provide operating conditions and equipment performance
- Full-scale visualizations that enable walking around and seeing products
- Accurate identification of spare parts
- Scaling across products, configurations, devices, and geographies.
The Best AR Remote Assistance Software: Vuforia Chalk
Vuforia Chalk is a powerful AR remote assistance and guidance application that helps experts and technicians solve problems more effectively.
You can think of it as an easy to deploy, mobile-based guidance and collaboration AR tool.
Vuforia Chalk enables pairs of mobile device users to collaborate around a shared view of objects and environments, with smart 3D annotation capabilities.
This allows senior experts to virtually share knowledge with junior colleagues and removes geographical barriers to collaboration. Picture this – if you’re a service technician in Nebraska, you can be helping someone located in Oklahoma just with the power of your fingers on your mobile device using the Vuforia Chalk app.
Vuforia Chalk combines advanced augmented reality with real-time communications to connect a field technician with an expert so that the expert can see and discuss the situation in the field.
With this powerful AR remote assistance application, a technician or an expert can draw digital annotations (using one’s finger on the screen) that accurately anchor to physical objects, allowing the expert to guide the technician through the process, step-by-step.
It allows experts and technicians to accurately markup live views, highlight details, and guide multi-step solutions.
Essentially, this AR tool empowers field technicians with instant “over the shoulder” field support to finish every jobs and tasks without delay.
The software helps organizations increase service quality while reducing repeat maintenance or repair visits – providing frontline workers with access to service information in a completely modern way.
Vuforia Chalk makes it easy to guide service and troubleshoot situations that may not be covered in training or service manuals.
Vuforia Chalk features and capabilities
Vuforia Chalk is paired with many distinguishing features and capacities that include:
- Zero development requirements- this AR tool can be provisioned in minutes and used immediately
- Connection links – Chalk users can connect with mobile devices using a video link. This allows the users to share views of the equipment or environment. Each user can draw on their screen to annotate the shared view.
- Advanced annotation that can be locked onto targets- this allows users to move around objects and annotations with 3D spatial recognition.
- Chalk views can be paused- this allows user to easily draw multi-step instructions over objects.
What are Vuforia Chalk applications used for?
Vuforia Chalk makes it easy for remote experts to provide remote over-the-sholder guidance to speed troubleshooting. Using either a mobile device or tablet, remote experts can connect to technicians and annotate on their shared view.
Vuforia Chalk is best used for:
- Enabling remote, virtual assistance between technicians and experts
- Collaboration between physically dispersed colleagues and teams
- Building lightweight AR pilots that prove value fast without development resources
Transform work instructions with Vuforia Expert Capture
Vuforia Expert Capture is the fastest and easiest way to create step-by-step instructions that help frontline workers get their job done accurately and efficiently.
Vuforia Expert Capture gives content creators and subject matter experts step-by-step instructions with rich media content, text, and audio to improve workforce productivity, quality, safety, and compliance.
It is an out-of-the-box AR solution that features drag and drop AR content creation for industrial enterprises looking to rapidly document expert knowledge and then easily scale that knowledge to new or redeployed workers as hands-on training or task guidance.
This tool provides an easy way for experts in your organization to record video procedures and instructions to others using augmented and assisted reality.
Features of Vuforia Expert Capture
There are many distinguishing features and capabilities of Vuforia Expert Capture some of which include:
- The ability to rapidly author AR instructions without CAD data, pre-existing assets or development efforts.
- Easy to use templates that simplify and accelerate creating and publishing AR content
- Content editing and publishing is in a secure, web-based environment
- The ability to automatically deliver optimized content across a variety of supported devices.
What are Vuforia Expert Capture applications used for?
Vuforia Expert Capture is best used for:
- Capturing procedures and tasks from senior experts
- Servicing and working with factory floor machines that lack relevant CAD data, or instances where documentation is unavailable or of poor quality
- Documenting multi-step procedures that take place in multiple locations
- Ensuring compliance through documentation of standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Why use Vuforia products?
Vuforia makes AR content easy to create and deliver widely to the enterprise to help improve efficiencies, reduce downtime, and enable safer and more productive workers.
With the industrial Vuforia AR platform, organizations can build custom experiences from the ground up, or rapidly create and scale enterprise-ready industrial AR experiences without writing any code using Vuforia Studio.
Whether the requirement is a custom solution or the ability to deliver rapidly, Vuforia delivers powerful, game changing industrial AR technology.
Looking to to get started with AR? Contact us.
If you…
- Need help evaluating potential manufacturing AR solutions, product trials and pricing details
- Are ready to learn how to transform your operational efficiencies, output, and quality with AR
… then get in touch with a Vuforia AR Specialist to answer questions and schedule your demonstration. Our AR experts can help you take the next step in your journey.
Let’s talk about how technical documentation impacts field service procedures, high costs of inaccurate technical information, the root causes of service failures, and how to achieve high field service productivity and effectiveness.
Many of the fundamental issues in service occur due to inaccurate service information and technical documentation that is difficult to understand.
We have all been in a situation, at least once, that involved failure to deliver a service as promised. Why? It’s because all brands and businesses make promises! But the truth is… service issues happen
When service fails to deliver on promises, or a buyer experiences poor customer service, the result almost always ends with lost customers, canceled subscriptions, and tarnished brand reputation.
The impact of a service failure can be devastating. Let’s talk about the root causes impacting service issues and failures
The impacts of service issues
The greatest influence on service almost always has to do with one thing; technical documentation. By technical documentation I am referring to tech pubs, standard operating procedure documents, service instructions, maintenance manuals, guides, work instructions, procedures, bulletins, etc.
I’m talking about anything and everything that is provided to help assist and guide service technicians. Many of the fundamental issues in service occur due to technical documentation, let’s talk about why.
Technical Documentation and Field Service
Today many field service and manufacturing organizations rely on traditional time-intensive methods to develop and deploy technical documentation such as service procedures, work instructions, guides, manuals, etc.
But the fact is – oftentimes the tech pubs, guides, and manuals that are created, aren’t even read (or in some cases even used) by field service representatives for which they were designed!
In addition, technician instruction manuals and documentation designed to be used in field service are often out-of-date. This is due to the high maintenance and distribution costs to create, maintain and produce continually up-to-date field service documentation.
This issue compounds as products become more and more complex in response to ever increasing customer demands for innovation and customization.
This rise in complex products has resulted in complex service and maintenance procedures, affecting and influencing inaccuracies in technical writing and documentation. As the demand for complex maintenance and service procedures increase, technician efficiency decreases due to more time being spent searching for the correct service information in a format that can be used on the field. This often results in repair and maintenance delays.
When service technicians encounter unfamiliar problems and don’t have reliable service information to solve a problem, the need for repeat service visits increases. There are many major negative consequences from these situations.
For example, a customer might experience equipment downtime. This downtime impacts both the service provider, as it inflates the cost of service, as well as the customer, as they lose productivity.
The high costs of inefficient field service
For you, as a service provider, the consequences of poor service information, complex products, and poor technician efficiency can drastically impact your costs of service in a number of ways.
For starters, let’s assume you work with service contracts. Service contracts often contain elements such as equipment up-time clauses. In the case you were to unintentionally breach one of these ‘set clauses’, it’s fair to assume the organization would face undesirable penalties and costs.
Take a deep breath. All is not lost. The added costs from inefficient service strategies are completely avoidable!
Repeat field service visits also drastically increase business costs. Multiple repeat visits to service products quickly increase costs and become very expensive. This is why many organizations seek to avoid repeat service visits at all cost.
A rarely considered cost-driver for service stems from difficulties comprehending poorly written, inaccessible, and out-of-date technical documentation.
When service technicians are unable to easily identify which spare parts are required, they often order multiple parts in hope that one will be correct. This results in high part returns, and handling costs. Not to mention, the need to hold more parts in stock from inflated orders (the bull whip effect), also affects parts inventory.
The skills gap is also increasing the cost of inefficient service.
“Faced with continuing economic expansion and retirement of baby boomers, the US manufacturing industry is looking at a potential shortage of 2.4 million workers in the next decade.” – 2018 Deloitte & The Manufacturing Institute skills gap study
To put it in perspective, a large portion of our workforce is approaching retirement soon. This is causing the skills gap to widen. With the loss of tribal knowledge, access to consumable expert knowledge becomes increasingly necessary.
New and inexperienced technicians have repeat service visits which cause an organization to face higher training costs, while overburdened experienced staff members are forced to train and pick up the slack for newer employees.
All of these things impact customer satisfaction. These conditions damage service reputations for both an organizations product, as well as, service contracts. Most importantly, all of these scenarios impact an organizations ability to retain customers and garner repeat business.
Sometimes you need to break down the barriers between product development and operations.
How to gain high service productivity and effectiveness
In order to obtain high technician productivity and effectiveness you must re-evaluate your service methods and procedures
Increase technician comprehension with accurate AR work instructions
To increase technician comprehension, look into concepts to create accurate, in-context augmented reality (AR) work instructions that overlay digital information onto a physical product.
Establish accurate part identification
Consider implementing accurate AR experiences so part identification, replacement and ordering are easy and accurate.
Enable remote real-time work instructions
Enable expert technicians to give remote, real-time guidance on physical objects using assisted reality tools like Vuforia Chalk.
All of these help service organizations create a more flexible, agile, workforce. These changes result in increased equipment uptime and productivity. They result in happier customers and more empowered workers.
Most importantly – you can start implementing these benefits today. All the technology currently exists. We would love to work with you and your organization to understand your service operations goals and map a path forward.
Many businesses rely on one or two technical writers to collect all required technical and digital information needed to create technical and marketing publications.
Most of this effort is manual, using the tried and true method of emailing, calling, and walking down the hall to bug technical resources for information or a screen grab; over and over.
Then the information is created using a one-and-done single-instance authoring software like Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe InDesign, or (please say it isn’t so!!!!) Microsoft Word.
This is a problem because a tremendous amount of risk is introduced when technical information is primarily collected via direct communication, emails, and other manual methods. There is significant room for error and it’s difficult to keep all related data and downstream documents up-to-date in the case of product changes.
Out of date information seems to trickle down to many different publishing channels. Even if tech writers are hardworking and very diligent, there is a natural opportunity to miss updates driven by upstream changes.
Just think of everywhere incorrect information could live if an update is missed. Web sites, user manual libraries, manufacturing instructions, service instructions, printed manuals, marketing literature, and the list goes on. This can increase the risk of providing out-of-date or inaccurate information to customers, manufacturing personnel, and service technicians.
There are a few different technologies available to help companies leverage existing engineering and design data for technical publications. If product data is housed in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool like PTC Windchill, it can be used to insure all needed technical digital data and information required by technical publications are managed by a single change process.
This pushes the responsibility for accurate information to the people that actually own it. It helps insure people throughout the organization are updating content as part of every change and new product release.
Once data is in one place it becomes easier to create integrations between tools like Windchill and tools like PTC’s Service Information Manager (SIM) and Arbortext.
An integration like this lets companies automatically, and dynamically, populate key information directly to technical publications. It also allows for the creation of integrations to push data to hosted catalogs and reseller sites.
Making the move from manual technical publications to what we just described allows tech writers to focus on optimization of publishing methods rather than data collection and integration. It helps insure overall accuracy of product data throughout the company and in the marketplace.
ROI for this shift is typically measured by the elimination of manual efforts and more importantly the reduction of customer dissatisfaction and lost business.
Stop absorbing unnecessary risk and costs related to out-of-date technical documentation being used by internal and external customers. Consider a dynamic publishing solution like Arbortext or PTC Service Information Manager.
Let content responsibility lie with the content creators. And delight customers with accurate product information no matter when, or how they access content.
We can help you map the optimal product data management and dynamic publishing solution for your business. Contact us to start the conversation. No pressure. Just answers.
