Augmented Reality 101: The Future of Work and AR for Business

Magic Leap – The incredibly scalable nature of augmented reality — accessible from dedicated headsets to simple smartphone apps — makes it ideal for remote technical support. For instance, using AR, technicians would no longer have to try to explain a fault in machinery to an engineer since the engineer would be able to see the issue from their own point of view, and potentially diagnose the problem remotely. One of the key metrics for support issues is time to resolution — a measure of how much downtime is lost while equipment is offline. AR can help resolve these types of issues more efficiently.

“We have a factory in South Florida and a partner of ours has a factory in Guadalajara,” explained Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson when she appeared on the “Leadership Next” podcast. Due to COVID restrictions, “we couldn’t send engineers back and forth. We were trying to bring up our next-generation product and all travel stopped. So we have our own production engineers in Guadalajara who may not be familiar with this new equipment for the next-gen product. They can make calls back to our engineers in South Florida who can see what they see. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t know that we’ll put engineers on airplanes in the future.”

In a recent webinar, Taqtile CCO Kelly Malone noted that frontline workers no longer have to wait for someone to be available or for a supervisor to free up time. “They can reach out to a colleague who’s familiar with the system. And because it’s integrated, they can see [through the device] who recently worked on the machine, who authored the procedure, and who else performed the job. That information is actually right there, at their fingertips, so they can reach out to knowledgeable individuals instead of making a scattershot call and hoping the person they reach out to knows the answer to the question.”