COVID has moved us closer to the industrial and VR industry revolution

Through the pandemic, many of us have become accustomed to working from our laptop at the dining room table and attending meetings on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. But for those in a business role, working in the field, and often performing urgent tasks, remote, boarded-up work machines do not fulfill a promise of a connected, collaborative future.

I work for a Ciena telecommunications network provider, and our employees often have to share visual information, coach each other, and get to know issues while working with him. both hands on that subject. In other cases, we are required to provide live information when we visit facilities or display our equipment. If you’ve ever tried to do this with commonly available technology, you know it doesn’t just walk around maintaining a laptop or tablet all the time.

So we have early adopted AR and VR technology and developed our own augmented reality solution. I saw the future, and I’m here to tell you, the AR and VR industry revolution is paramount.

We are ready for augmented reality

We are at a rapid stage where this technology that started as a consumer curiosity quickly fills a vital enterprise need. Augmented reality solves the problem that we cannot physically see or touch what our colleagues are doing, especially when teaching or instructing on highly technical systems.

So far, AR and VR have been somewhat niche and experimental. Pokémon GO and VR games have given us a taste of what technology can do. But in those consumer use cases, slower networks with high latency never posed risks in a life-threatening or potentially failing business emergency application.

Business applications, such as allowing first responders to see their colleagues through the walls of a burning building or crossing parts with an assembly guide, will not work just without a strong enough communications network with high speeds and low speed. When employee safety and business continuity are on the line, these applications have no place for a jittery network.

The number and density of connected devices in these applications can be challenging for them to use, which is why 5G and optical networking will play such an important role in their adoption. Future networks need extra attention in monitoring and managing the quality of connections to ensure that service bottlenecks are not significantly affected.

Seeing is believing

In terms of our own practice, there was no one specific solution that met our needs. Many vendors developing industry standard solutions focus on defense / armament. To meet our needs, we had to buy hardware and software from a number of places and weave them together to create our perfect solution. Although it took a little effort to customize the mix of parts, the benefits we realized were huge.

For one, augmented reality offers more immersive and engaging learning experiences. When you are in a virtual environment, you are trapped and there is little outside trouble – it is almost impossible not to get involved.

Of course, we are still looking for new ways to use augmented reality in the work environment, but our company has been very successful in getting employees to buy into the technology as we allow carry out experiments and create their own use cases (explained below). We challenge them to try new ways to communicate with our customers and offer in-house education / suggestions.

For example, we have recently used AR headsets to guide our partners on product design and quality assurance at some of our manufacturing sites. By equipping headphones for our own employees, our customers have the option of streaming what our employees see through their home computers. The show is so compelling that we have even sent equipment to our customers to get the full experience. We have also used AR to provide customers with meaningful / interactive demos from our labs and to equip our IT team to support our remote offices without the need for physical travel.

From a usage standpoint, this makes sense when you look at Zoom over the past year. A year ago, many people were skeptical about using Zoom to hold in-depth, inclusive, and collaborative meetings in a remote setting. Moving on to the present day, we have found that technology has allowed us to work from home, reduce the need to travel, and have more time with our families. I see the same epiphany happening with augmented reality.

You don’t have to add to your budget (too much)

At this early stage, we have approximately two dozen employees involved in augmented reality projects, with headphones distributed to customers as needed. Each headset has given us the equivalent cost of a laptop. Since the hardware is a one-time cost, the price is ultimately nested in the absence of the need for physically present subject matter experts.

What we have realized is that the investment at this stage is important in customer experience. I think the best advice I can offer to organizations considering augmented reality right now is that you need to think about the layers that bring the whole experience together.

For example, you will need UI design experts who will be aware of where messages and header displays are placed within the field of view. The chance is that your application of augmented reality will be unique, and you will need a programmer who will be able to integrate features and functions into the solution that meet your specific business need, such as the ability identify items or add information to other users’ comments. . Perhaps more importantly, you need to ensure smooth operation, both for continuity and customer comfort. Augmented reality solutions use a lot of data, and nothing is more appealing than jumping or weakening images. Worse, visual information that is not synchronized with the user’s mental capacity to process that image will have a detrimental effect that completely destroys the experience.

While there are only a handful of headset providers today, our own experience with AR and VR leads me to believe that the market is going to be open. Just like the adoption of Zoom, we will soon ponder what has taken us all so long to embrace the technology, and the market for solutions will be as diverse as the market for cameras or laptops today.

Craig Williams has a CIO at Ciena.