First off — give yourself a huge high-five. You’re about to change the experience — and the way — your company trains employees forever. Because once you start down the road of digital experiential training and see the benefits, there’s no coming back.
And that’s probably a bit scary too. We get that.
So, here are the 4 biggest things you probably aren’t expecting that you will likely encounter for the first few miles of your journey:
It’s going to take new and unusual preparation materials
Think back to when your company’s training materials went from paper to PDF. What was required for that change? Well… likely not that much beyond a few Acrobat licenses. That’s because the essential training modules themselves didn’t change, just the container that housed it went digital.
And later, when you went from the PDF to an eLearning platform was also relatively continuous — as most companies just chunked the same materials into pages/slides into a browser/web app.
All of the above transitions were essentially packaging changes, from one form of 2D knowledge to another.
When you take the leap to augmented reality, you add a whole new dimension — literally. Adding 3D content to your training curriculums requires that you collect a whole new type of content: CAD/ 3D Models.
When you get started, you will probably have to send this kind of email:
Dear Back-office Design Engineer,
I’m building a wildly exciting, immersive training program using augmented reality with WorkLink. Can you please send me a few of the latest CAD files of our equipment?
And yes, when I’m done, you’ll be the first to get to try it.
Thanks!
– Unusually Awesome Training Ninja
Make sure that you follow through with the promise of letting them try it. In the world of 3D digital training your Design Engineers will likely become your friends. Consider it from their perspectives’ — they want people to use their products the way they were intended, so ultimately it is a win-win for everyone involved.
It’s really not about the hardware — you and your trainees probably already have it
Type “augmented reality” into Google Images, and you get a million iconic images of people using head-mounted devices (HMD). There’s no denying that the marketing content around AR products focuses heavily on the HMD flash–we’re occasionally guilty of it too, including the key image of this blog! And while those are certainly cool and functional, the training experience on a smartphone or a tablet is still breathtaking (and as effective in most cases).
The best part is that your team probably already has the smartphones required for the training. Just about everything since 2015 comes with either ARcore or ARkit… and that’s all you need folks.
In the long run, it is definitely about the content, not the device. More on that if you are curious here.
It’s going to challenge the way you measure competency, for the better
When you train in person with an instructor — in full 3D reality — do they offer you a multiple choice quiz at the end? They could, but they probably don’t. AR training works the same way. You learn by observing, by doing, by manipulating, and by sequencing, and by completing tasks.
Consider the 3D video game industry — most of them begin with a Level 0, forcing you to train how to perform key actions in the game experientially first, before you dive into the real thing. This is how the next generation is accustomed to training:
Here a video gamer trains with an “aim trainer,” an experience-based tool outside of the game to sharpen skills that require complex 3D performance to achieve the task.
When you move away from the multiple choice test, it becomes much more complicated to grade performance on a linear scale that is easily storable in your LMS. It’s just a fact of the 3D world, and it moves assessment methodology more into the realm of “how” completion was achieved, time per step, spatial effects like collision and danger avoidance, etc (remember the game Operation?).
Ultimately, these 3D “how” assessments of task completion are far better predictors of field performance than the legacy multiple choice quiz of the eLearning paradigm. The MC quiz still has its place, particularly for binary knowledge (X is compatible with Y), but the emerging standard of competency assessment in the field is in how well the spatial and temporal actions are performed by the trainee.
It’s going to far exceed your expectations in terms of who you can train, their total engagement, their time to competency, and overall impact
Of all the things our customers experience that they weren’t expecting — this is the most common. They simply didn’t think the net impact on training would be as high as they actually experience, especially with complicated, critical devices and aerospace capital equipment and medical devices.
A recent WorkLink customer, a Fortune 50 enterprise in the medical device industry conducted a controlled experiment with their Sales training and certification programs. They measured a 55% improvement in competency and scoring, with a 29% acceleration in the total time spent in training.
As you can see, these are not incremental gains in eLearning software, but a paradigm shift that often comes as a surprise to our customers.
For more information about our success in medical device training use cases of WorkLink, or to find out how to get started, feel free to reach out to us at any time.
How many million times have we each heard this? Whether from our parents, teachers, or worse — your manager… this simple demand comes as a jarring course correction for what was “just” a momentary mental side track.
And the wording is accurate too. It definitely is something that feels like it is being “paid.” And further: companies spend trillions of dollars each year to buy it from you. In 2021, it takes a real effort of conscious self-management to devote your full attention to a task for more than 30 seconds. Learning and training are known areas where the stakes of focus and attention to tasks are at their highest. This is especially challenging if that task is related to work, rote repetition, or over long periods uninterrupted.
At least, in some industries.
Before I dig into augmented reality, let’s briefly look at the attention monopolies. The entertainment and social media industries, by their very nature, are unbelievably adapted to absorb your attention without limit. Somehow, they have perfected the ability to send just the right signals to your brain, at just the right intervals, to keep you returning for more and more — and it never feels like a “payment.”
Which of these browser tabs is constantly screaming at me to ditch work and click on it?
Is it a coincidence that Youtube and Netflix have bright red logos? Their own algorithms optimize one simple function: maximize viewer watch time (or, hoard your attention.)
How?
This is in fact an area of deep research — and Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar is one of many investigating neurological patterns in the brain to model how people focus, with the ultimate purpose of treating ADHD. One of his points is that attention is both an active and a passive filtration exercise, and that the filtration is deeply coupled with vision.
The eyes lead the mind
What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar TED Talk July 12 2017
He devised an experiment that tested attention among competing stimuli. It had two flickering lights at different rates, and a brain signal scanner on the subject. Sure enough, the brain signals synchronized perfectly with whichever flickering light that the subject looked at.
This is huge– it shows that the eyes guide the neurological filtration “algorithm” of our minds.
Data rates, pure and simple. But that’s not enough.
High speed or high attention?
Ask any teaching or training professional, they would argue that the success of their students isn’t just about maximizing the speed at which they learn, but that they pay attention for enough time. Homework is designed for that purpose: to force you to spend enough time paying attention to the subject. The result is a grade.
For employee training programs it is a bit more complicated. While some are scored with tests, they have found that real world training success rates track closer on training “engagement” — a measure of how much attention was paid. Indicators of real world success rates include time to first satisfactory “production” execution, mean time between execution failure, and rework rate.
That’s why corporate training and compliance programs, especially video-based programs, have employed draconian measures to force their students to engage. Disable fast forward. Countdown timers before multiple choice responses can be submitted. Captcha quizzes along the way, etc…Not visually engaging nor interactive, despite being temporally sufficient.
The best video programs prompt trainees for interaction frequently. “What should you do in this situation?” prompted before moving on. The interaction drives the engagement.
High speed AND high attention, is the answer
When visuallyengaging training tools are used, net success rates go up, and training times to reach competency go down.
And that is why augmented reality works brilliantly for training. It is both engaging and visual, a stimulating graphical superposition of the computer world on top of the real one.
A Scope AR medical device customer deployed AR to train their field service and sales teams on their broad product line as part of their strategic imperative to deliver their global teams with state of the art training.
In under a year, they capitalized on their new ability to remain agile, train faster, and provide immersive value at a distance. They were able to capture a multimillion dollar cost savings from travel avoidance and higher first-time performance rates. AR has ultimately become key to their end customer differentiation and perception of excellence in the medical device market– based on the first principles of keeping their trainees fully engaged, at the right speed, and without “paying” attention.
NTT DATA announced on May 28 that it will start providing AR (Augmented Reality) work support services utilizing “WorkLink” of Scope AR of the United States from May 28.
WorkLink is a platform that allows you to use work support using 3D manuals realized by AR and work support by experts from a remote location at the same time.
NTT DATA will realize the unification of progress management of on-site work by automating the creation of 3D manuals for WorkLink using the original document reading AI solution “LITRON”, including the sale of WorkLink, and by linking with systems such as ServiceNow. That is.
As AR services, we will provide 3D manual creation support service and integration service.
Service provision image
NTT DATA aims to provide a work support platform that can provide a work environment equivalent to the situation in which experts are present when conducting on-site work and pre-work training for workers, and to reduce the amount associated with the introduction. We have been discussing with Scope AR, which has a lot of achievements in introduction by major heavy industry manufacturers in the United States, and developing collaborative functions.https://44d6036fff987401c2c185acc69f3ea0.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
In the 3D manual creation support service, 3D manuals for WorkLink are created based on the product manuals and maintenance procedure manuals owned by customers. NTT DATA will support the improvement of the quality of 3D manuals, such as importing into 3D manuals by scanning the work target equipment and additional implementation of work procedures by 3D animation that cannot be expressed by existing manuals.
“WorkLink” service features
In addition, by linking with the document reading AI solution LITRON and RPA tools provided by NTT DATA, text data and knowledge are automatically extracted from the manual, reducing the work time for creating a large amount of 3D manuals.
The integration service links WorkLink with other systems. For example, when linked with ServiceNow, which is a management platform for various information and operations that occur in IT system operation and field work, the appropriate 3D manual in WorkLink can be called according to the assigned field work task. Data such as the workers recorded in WorkLink and the time required for the work can be accumulated in ServiceNow and analyzed.
Use cases include manufacturing processes and maintenance work in the manufacturing industry, 3D conversion of in-house product manuals in the manufacturing industry, maintenance and inspection work in the utility industry such as electricity, gas, and water, and on-site work in the distribution industry. ..
NTT DATA will sell this service to various fields that require on-site work, such as manufacturing, utility, and distribution, and aims to sell more than 100 companies by the end of 2024.
“Give me a long enough lever arm, and a place to stand, and I will move the world”
Archimedes
Leverage
I find the relationship of humans to leverage to be absolutely fascinating. Watch any great film, especially one with dramatic struggle, and undoubtedly the protagonist and antagonist are ultimately competing with forms of leverage. It is a concept found in some of our most ancient stories — think the timeless duel between David and Goliath.
Goliath exerts his forms of leverage: Size, strength, and social influence. David exerts his: the technology of throwing a stone with a sling, (and perhaps brazen confidence). What makes this story so sticky is that it is a competition between heterogeneous forms. If David also had strength and size — or if Goliath were small and also had a stone sling… would anyone bother to take note?
Why heterogenous leverage in competition is so exciting
I think it is the uncertainty inside of competing heterogeneous leverage that makes it so exciting. It challenges our mental models into extrapolation — into guesswork, and the possibility that the result of the competition leads to a new discovery. Could this new form of leverage be categorically better than everything else we have today? What are its upper limits? Are there even limits?
Naval Ravikant laid out some categories of leverage I think apply here well:
Capital – Virtually infinitely scalable, capital leverage is a modern form that is tricky to use, but extremely capable. It generally must be applied in conjunction with other forms of leverage.
Technology – Akin to the sling of David that took down Goliath, this one is the most exciting to me because of two reasons:
It isn’t purely volumetric. Unlike labor and capital, it relies more on execution and intelligence to bring it to effect
It is perfectly limitless in its potential impact
Consider the task of communicating with a person on a remote island in the Pacific. Among leverage options here, the obvious winner would be Technology: a satellite telephone provides near instant communication gobally. Labor leverage would give you thousands of people to row boats to and from the Island. Clearly not great. Capital could work by laying miles of undersea wiring — but even that would require both technology and labor.
This is a perhaps glib example — sure — but all too often businesses rely on labor and capital alone to solve problems, and lag on the technology leverage opportunity. Can you think of a time when 10 of your colleagues embarked on a new project for a month, only to find that “there’s already an app for that” that can accomplish this task in hours or minutes? That’s technology leverage.
In the modern age of information and automation, technologies are constantly providing order-of-magnitude improvements to human problems.
But there’s a caveat, and it due to the ever-present hiccup with technology: complexity.
Why technology favors complex use cases
Technology, like any complex instrument, has its peculiarities around the use case. Some technology-use-case pairings work stupendously well, some just OK, and some totally fail. From a statistical point of view, you could say that the gain in peak performance brought by technology comes at a widening of both positive and negative outcomes. Specificity on the use case, and the conditions in which the technology is applied must be just right to unlock its leverage.
See anything wrong here?
GPS is a fabulous navigation technology; especially over long distances and in a new, foreign city with a myriad of one-way streets. However, using Google Maps to drive ¼ mile to the familiar post office is ineffective overkill.
The problem has to be complex enough for the technology to effect its peak leverage.
But…
The problem with complexity is… humans.
With the dawn of the post-pandemic era, we are left in an increasingly complex and strained economy. We hear from our customers and prospects that they feel mounting pressure to:
Shorten time to proficiency
Eliminate human unforced errors
Increase productivity and efficiency in workforce
Reduce incident error rates
It’s easy to see that these challenges are complex. Eliminate unforced errors in people? Increase technician productivity? The good news is that they are likely very sensitive to technology leverage. However, the defining characteristic of these challenges is that they are intensely human. This means that the standard Industry 4.0 technologies like cloud computing, storage, sensor networks, and machine vision can achieve 10X gain in by automation and removal of tasks, but they rarely provide 10X gains on the human themselves. It’s only when those technologies are somehow directly connected to humans can there be those gains.
Augmented reality though, is exactly that: it is the data portal to the human, and it offers the fastest knowledge bandwidth possible into (and out of) the human brain.
Augmented reality favors complex use cases, especially for first timers.
As we’ve continually said, it’s all about the “use case, use case, use case.”
Scope AR has pointed and developed our AR solution to a peculiar set of critical and difficult business problems: showing people how to do something new that’s really complicated. It’s GPS for your first time driving through Boston at rush hour, not to your local neighborhood grocer.
As it turns out, showing people how to do something that is highly technical for the first time is a difficult “Goliath” of a business problem, and happens to be specifically vulnerable to augmented reality in a big way (pun intended.) It’s why training is so critical to today’s essential workers, and why it is important to train as many experts as possible.
And among our customers’ actual use cases, it is those with high criticality and complexity that offers augmented reality the greatest potential for leverage.
First-time-right is a major path to 10X return
Gartner analyzed the 5 major cost drivers across industries, and the first one was cost of rework. Our customers in field service and manufacturing are keen on this, and it is why we often hear from them that they break even on their investment in augmented reality with simply one technician in one day.
Yes. One day.
How is this possible? By achieving first-time-right in high criticality work environments. This avoids a whole gamut of cancerous cost drivers: return service trips, quality recalls, warranty issues, damaged brand image and reputation, etc.
First-time-right is the end result of several factors beyond the design of the component and the service process itself. It is comprised of high quality manufacturing, high quality technician training, and high quality service, and each of these functions are perfectly suited for augmented reality-driven leverage.
The 10X result with augmented reality is real, have a look at this customer presentation, where Shelley Peterson highlights the breakdown of several 10X improvements in touch labor for Lockheed Martin.
In the past we would have developers who would spend months developing these types of applications. With Scope Ar’s worklink platform, we’re bringing this down to 28 minutes, and 4 minutes for an additional panel. The ramp up time on the platform has also been reduced significantly. We can bring in a new developer, have them go through a half day training online and they can start creating work instructions.”
Prior to our WorkLink Create launch, I sat down with the fine folks on camera at Click Bond, our customer that develops innovative fastening solutions for aerospace, marine, and land transportation. You can watch the 3-minute testimonial video here, but there was so much great discussion we realized it needed its own blog. This interview doesn’t focus on Scope AR particularly, rather a deep dive into how humans learn, how creativity is harnessed and shared, and where mixed reality solutions could play a key role. So I give you Karl Hutter — the CEO and President of Click Bond, a die-hard pilot, innovator, and a brilliant, expansive thinker.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Alright. So state your name and what it is you do for Click Bond.
Karl Hutter: I’m Karl Hutter, President and CEO of Click Bond.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Awesome. And in just a few sentences, what does Click Bond produce?
Karl Hutter: What does Click Bond produce? (laughs) Click Bond produces new possibilities. Click Bond’s in the business of supporting those who design, build and maintain, I would call high performance platforms around the world. Now that’s predominantly in aerospace, but also things that swim, things that roll, and it’s not just things with wings, but that’s really where kind of our core and our history and our heart has been. And really, I think that as our company has evolved over the last 32 years, we’ve recognized something super important (I certainly have as CEO for the last five) that it’s about people.
When we think about what our ideas, our designs, and our products enable, it’s enabling people to be more creative, to be more productive, to do better work and focus the human effort on the parts that humans need to be able to do, which is being creative and solving problems.
KARL HUTTER
So, when we give tools to people that you might call our products, it really allows them to do work in new and imaginative ways and takes away constraints. And the way that we predominantly do that is by eliminating the need to drill holes in perfectly good materials, and instead, use that intersection between adhesives and mechanical fastening to allow new possibilities by assembling aircraft and other platforms in new ways.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Awesome. Things with wings.
Karl Hutter: Things with wings, but not just. [laughter]
Scope AR (Interviewer): In your view, how has technology transformed knowledge in your company in the last 30 years?
Karl Hutter: So there’s two phases to how technology has transformed knowledge and its deployment over that period of time. Internally, we’ve had tremendous focus on how we really tap the experience, the creativity, the passion of every Click Bonder. We’ve used technology as the sort of enabling tool to bring people closer together — to be able to get more people’s ideas on the page as it were. It has stimulated better processes, new product ideas, creative application ideas that we then can take outside and use our technology to transform. Again, the way that other people do their work at our, say prime contractor customers or sub-contractors, and in turn, then those folks really can enable some missions of consequences, I like to call them. So whether that’s returning to the moon, whether that’s understanding our planet better, whether it’s getting the good guys home safe or getting grandma and the presents here for Christmas. We really look at how we can take technology, again, to bring out talent and get creativity capably deployed.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Do you think knowledge has value without creativity?
Karl Hutter: Yeah, but I think it’s pretty static though. The challenge is that if you program the robot as it were to execute perfectly and capably every time, you’re going to do a good job of getting exactly the same thing for a long time to come. As I think this year has shown us the world’s a pretty dynamic place though. If we’re going to continue to, as we say at Click Bond, expand the possible, which is a key tenet of our mission, and we put ourselves there by the way, because we recognize that the world rewards taking on challenging, seemingly impossible things and proving otherwise that that’s how kind of the possibilities curve, the frontier moves forward. We need to direct our attention at that. When you are in a place where the world is changing, where the problem set is very dynamic, I think it’s really critical that you harness the creativity of people so that you can continue to evolve those solutions. Now, whether that’s to keep your company competitive, your country competitive, or simply to keep the focus on the problems of consequence in the world as it changes, I think that the creativity of human beings and the ability to really not only empower them to deploy that, but to give them the tools and the confidence to do that easily and fluidly is absolutely essential.
Scope AR (Interviewer): I totally agree. So when I think about technologies around knowledge, the most obvious one is like going from paper to the Internet. Do you remember what that was like here?
Karl Hutter: Yeah. Well, I am from the right bandwidth of experience to have typed the term paper on Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, but even Word Star. So all of my experience in knowledge, capture and deployment in school was on a computer for the deploy part, but it was almost all in the library on paper, microfiche on the capture side of things. And of course it’s a completely different world now, and the ability to absorb information in more efficient ways is a huge unlock to the acceleration we’ve seen in the last couple decades. But it also has, I think met the human beings in a different place, I.e., where they are, and at the same time transformed how humans need to, or prefer to take in knowledge.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Would you say there’s an analogy maybe of like, how has that experience been going from… So the microfiche to the internet and Word Perfect to now Google Drive and Google Docs?
Karl Hutter: I don’t know if I’m that advanced, but…[chuckle]
Scope AR (Interviewer): Like PDF instruction manuals, service installation instructions to augmented reality?
Karl Hutter: Yeah. So this is where we have a huge opportunity for an unlock. Today’s digital information, whether it’s the approach I fly with in the airplane, or whether it’s the instruction manual for a technical piece of equipment, by and large they all are still PDFs, in some organizational system on a drive. We cling to the familiar, especially in places where there’s a lot of process control and regulation. We cling to these outdated archetypes of how information should be presented and they’re comfy and familiar, but they’re naturally limiting.
I think the ability to access information from any dimension that is useful to you at that moment with your experience, with your preferences for learning, is really key.
So as you move from the static paper, whether it’s dusty pages and stacks of binders, or whether it’s digital versions, you move from those to something like augmented reality work instructions. You’ve gone from 2D to 3D, and you’ve gone from a script to sort of a limitless world.
What I think is super important is that there is a transition of generations in the workforce to technical people who are digital natives. And for them, you need to meet them where they are.
KARL HUTTER
The way that they now learn comes from problem solving in a very dynamic real-time space, whether that’s playing Halo or whether that’s managing complex social relationships in real-time on Periscope. It’s a different way of taking things in. What I would suggest is that when we speak from our industry of the airmen working on an F-35, or a new mechanic on the line at Boeing Seattle, that the way that they’re going to capably learn technically complex, sophisticated information is not going to be from someone growling at them to go read the binders off the big bookshelf.
It’s going to be by presenting information to them in a way to them… In a way that is inherently comfortable and familiar. When we see tools like augmented reality and other digital connected systems open the door for those new people, I would say that that’s super critical to harness the wisdom and the experience of the outgoing generation.
Scope AR (Interviewer): This point’s excellent, by the way. I think the genesis, the creation point, that’s super important.
Karl Hutter: Yeah. Well, also there’s a piece that speaks to expert capture here. There’s much said about the Apollo generation that got us to the moon the first time— that is not with us as much anymore. Did we capture what they know? We need to be doing that capture every single day. And that’s an exciting place because we can figure out through grabbing that wisdom, how can we then dynamically update and manage technical learning and processes and evolve them creatively and keep them very dynamic and at the same time, have the sort of process control for the released production version that’s necessary to keep the sort of law and order that’s required by safety-critical and mission-critical things?
Scope AR (Interviewer): Do you think that the interface itself is going to be more critical for that outgoing generation? Do do they transplant their task and knowledge into the box? Are there things that can be done to prove that particular use case?
Karl Hutter: If I’m imagining what the perfect interface for this would be, and I would say this is really for all users, but particularly for folks who are not inherently digital savvy or don’t use a computer every day. I feel that the AR tools, as I’ve seen them now, already take you past that clumsy interface. It’s participating in a world. I think that the ideal interface for capturing that knowledge is one where you can live out the operation physically and in real time. For example… for the last 30 years or for the last 30 days, I have reached around here and into there, tried not to skin my arm on that and then gotten some help to do this, and then have somebody try to write that down, and then somebody else code it and somebody else say like this. What if we could actually just climb into the world together and do the operation on the digital twin?
Now, what if when you did that, the computer was in real time editing the process and the work instruction and remembering when you backed up and when you tried something different? I think if you could make that the interface, you could do some incredibly powerful things very quickly and get people on-ramped in a way that I think is engaging and collaborative and fun, and I don’t know. I think that’s all within reach.
Scope AR (Interviewer): It’s like knowledge transfer by participation and replication.
Karl Hutter: Yeah. I think as human beings are at our best and our most engaged and therefore most creative when we’re having fun and we’re actually working with other people. I grew up learning all about airplanes and the problems that are faced in designing and building and maintaining them by climbing around in airplanes, going on customer visits with my dad, working on the airplanes here, and really understanding it first-hand. So what was that? That’s experiential learning. That participatory learning and teaching, that sharing of information and the mutual discovery of something new, I think is enabled even in the time when it was always impractical to literally, you know, go to the plant floor and climb around in the airplane. That was always a treat.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Do you feel that Augmented Reality is going to keep growing and expanding? What technologies do you foresee will threaten that growth?
Karl Hutter: Yeah. I think in a very real way, where some people have a richer and deeper experience set with what we call immersive or 3D… Even just 3D visualizations. I think there is a long runway for what humans have yet to explore and be enabled by when it comes to immersive visual world, let’s put it that way.
I’m not worried about the obsolescence of this… that visual portal, that visual sensor is the most compelling one that our brains have provided for us, our bodies have provided for us. In flight simulation, it’s regarded as far more powerful to have wide field of vision on the… Wide field of view on the visual presentation than it is to actually have five access hydraulic motion, which one’s cheaper?
I’m just going to give you an aside here, I’ve been playing flight simulator since 1981, Microsoft Flight Simulator, CGA on an IBM PC. Joystick was like this, one little button. I’ve had a chance to expose my daughter Marley to Microsoft FS 2020 [chuckle] as running a modern rig as hard as it can, but she’s participating in that through an HTC-Vive headset. She says, “Dad, this is like… ” As she very competently grabs the yoke and flies around central Idaho, she’s like, “This is like being in the real airplane.” And the thing that is crazy is it’s the nuances. When you put on that headset and you go into the VR version of Flight Simulator, which today is increasingly gorgeous and perfect, it’s the things that to a pilot are natural that made the flight simulators of the past just useless. Where is the runway? “Oh, it should be over my left shoulder.” When you put someone in the world that they are either trying to hone or demonstrate their craft within, it all becomes very natural.
We can transport folks from whatever their physical reality is and augment them to a place where “The unseen becomes visible.” I might not be able to go climb around on the airplane. Instead, let’s bring the digital twin of the airplane or the relevant part from my need-to-know basis. I think that that ability to bring the reality to the participant and do that simultaneously all around the world is an incredibly powerful and compelling possibility. And I think what it does is perhaps to the joy of some and the consternation and worry of others is, it really makes the ability to deploy creative problem-solving talent possible from anywhere in the world.
So now, just because I didn’t grow up in Puget Sound or Wichita or Toulouse or a number of limited places, I can participate. And that means that the best minds from Central Africa to the Mongolian step now could participate in these types of creative problem solving. I think that’s a very powerful force, and that probably extends not just to the business of design and problem solving, but to manufacturing as well, so if we can solve some of the challenges of additive manufacturing, repeatably and with quality and the authentication of what was made…
I live in a business where the digital product is as important as the physical product itself. When blockchain, additive manufacturing and collaborative digital design enabled by XR, all meet, now we’re really cooking because now we’re designing, now we’re manufacturing and probably now we’re also maintaining and training again, anywhere in the world.
Click Bond is a solutions company, so we’re very concerned with not just creating a great product with great value and perfect quality, putting it in a box, sending it out, on time of course, and getting it into the customer’s hands. It’s everything that comes before that and after that. So we’re very involved in the applications engineering stage, helping the customer to understand the problem and helping us to understand the problem, coming up with a novel solution, whether it’s from the standard product set or something new, coming up with something that will really address that, and then on the back side, doing all of the necessary training and handholding to ensure success.
We all saw how Apollo 13 was solved: One transmission at a time. One experiment at a time. Playing with bits of surplus and models. Imagine what we can do when we’re on our way to Mars and things are even sportier (and help is further away) if we can truly all jump back into the engineering model together? Astronaut, engineer, mechanic, and really solve those problems. So I think that we’re just seeing the beginning of where tools like this are going to find their way.
Scope AR (interviewer): Do you feel that complexity threatens that? As in, the sort of proliferation where compared to 20 years ago we way did things has now been miniaturized, and the parts are way more specific to their use case, way more unique and optimized to its particular configuration. Does that threaten the sort of ability to acquire creative solutions?
Karl Hutter: You mentioned miniaturization and you mentioned specialization. So with regard to miniaturization, just to see that for a second, the ability of tools to allow more people to get inside the circuit, let’s say of the micro-electronics, to get inside the molecule of pharmaceutical, ride with it inside the human body, these are things that expand the ability of more people, where not just a certain small set or even potentially only a computer to “get their heads around”, and I think that in that axis, again, the power of visualization to make the unseen seen, in this case because it’s so small or maybe it’s so unfathomably large it’s so hard to comprehend, makes us a powerful tool to combat that.
When it comes to really esoteric knowledge, I think that this is even more relevant. The idea that you can step into an environment where you are learning while you do and doing while you learn is amazing. Why burden the human being with memorizing, or being able to interpret, or even taking the time to look up things that don’t require the human spirit to do, okay?
For Augmented Reality .. let’s present whatever is necessary and relevant in a very clean visual language, in a way that basically says, “Don’t go here. Go over there. Trust that. It should look like this. Does it? Yes, it does. Boom, okay, now go focus on the human problem, which is, how are we going to solve this problem, or what’s wrong in a way that really reduces the problem set and then provides you very dynamic knowledge as you go.” I think that it is a wonderful way to continue to harness the best of what makes the human necessary, even in an increasingly esoteric, or complex, or unfathomable scale in the things that we work on. Remember, our intent was to make it easier and more mistake proof to build and maintain aircraft.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Isn’t that the same way that we learn in the first place? We like some interesting thing, and we go and check it out.
Karl Hutter: Yeah, you play with it. And maybe it burns you, or it shocks you, or maybe it tastes good. Right? [chuckle] But those are deep-rooted human instincts. And the ability to reengage, or deepen people’s engagement in lifetime learning, lifelong learning is really key. And I really have a vision that isn’t necessarily specifically tied to AR, but certainly includes it. And it’s come up, particularly in the last year here at Click Bond, where we’ve recognized that there are folks who have abundant access to digital information, and there are folks who live in this information desert. And it tends to be the folks on our shop floor. They don’t sit at a workstation that tends to have a computer right now, there’s a lot of conveying information verbally, there is not the access to the dialogue that’s going on. Most folks there don’t have email accounts in that setting. And I don’t think the answer is email accounts.
What’s exciting is if you envision a portal for every Click Bond-er, and what can I get through that interface, through that screen, what will I see through the glasses? And being able to provide all the information, teach people how to interpret it, certainly, decide and understand what’s useful, but then let them go make decisions based on that information, and have access to all that they might want, and let their curiosity drive the investigation, I think, will be incredibly powerful. We’re looking forward to starting to pilot some of that, even here in the next year. And that ties together everything from work instructions in digital and immersive formats, to IoT concepts and being able to look across that floor and see which machine needs help and which one’s doing just fine, and so much more.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Yeah, well, I can tell you that as your partner (Scope AR), we’re super thrilled to see what you do. What has the partnership experience has been like for you?
Karl Hutter: Well, I have been excited about the possibilities of bringing together a lifelong interest in immersive worlds and simulation with what we actually do here at Click Bond. And it is just amazing to be at a point in my career and in our journey where the needs of our industry, the use case, if you will, overlap and intersect with the availability of the right technology, and more important than either of those two, the right partner. And Scope AR has been an amazing partner in the short time of just a year that we’ve been working together in terms of diving right in with matching that enthusiasm, that capability, and I will really say that agility. It was hard to understand where to go first, and I found myself kind of poking around and searching and following a couple of paths. I will say that there are other players out there who we spoke with, and it was hard.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Why?
Karl Hutter: There wasn’t an excitement about jumping in and getting shoulder to shoulder and playing, all right? And experimenting and together discovering the value prop, discovering the killer app. Because we didn’t know where it was, or if it was… we just needed to get going. And I think that’s what you guys at Scope AR have done so well, [You’ve] joined us in the journey, had faith in the investment and working with us, and we just together have gotten after it. And I think that even in that short time we have engaged with common customers, I think inspired some excitement there, and I really think it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of where we can take this. But the importance of having somebody who has the knowledge, has the experience, but is willing to play at the level of agility and let’s see what happens next-ed-ness’ that we do, that’s not for everybody, and it’s better to be with somebody who you really see things eye to eye with.
Scope AR (Interviewer): Thank you so much. We really appreciate that.
Hunt Valley, MD (March 2, 2021) — The Corrugating Machinery Division of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America has announced the expansion of EVOL AR, its industry-first Remote Assistance Augmented Reality Program. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America (MHIA) is a leading supplier of Corrugating and Box Making machinery.
Current EVOL AR customers have been able to reduce equipment downtime by up to 50%. EVOL AR allows plant managers, technicians, and engineers to quickly and efficiently share issues in real-time from their facilities, enabling MHIA technical support staff to see and resolve machine issues and assist in troubleshooting. EVOL AR equips MHIA technical experts with the ability to draw and annotate on their device, text on the screen, and capture pictures or video for future reference.
The expansion of EVOL AR in response to ongoing customer feedback since the program’s 2019 launch and throughout 2020 in order to enhance the program’s value and efficacy through additional augmented reality capabilities. With this new release, existing EVOL AR customers will immediately gain access to the following five components:
FE Front Stop Gap Calibration
2. FE Side Guide Limit Calibration
3. Feed Roll Gap Calibration
4. Back Stop Limit Calibration
5. Back Stop Parallel Adjustment
This first content drop will cover every gap and limit calibration on the Feeding Unit. The process begins by building procedures for every gap and limit calibration on the entire EVOL. The long-term plan is for this valuable library of comprehensive and easy-to-access AR content to replace traditional printed or PEF-based maintenance and operation manuals.
Novice mechanics, electricians, and more junior technicians will be able to more effectively perform complex maintenance tasks through using this new online procedural content library.
“Our expanded EVOL AR is the latest investment we’re making to directly benefit our customers, another technology and service value-add that keeps box plants up, running, and profitable,” said Darrold Phillips, Vice President Service, MHIA Corrugating Machinery Division.
EVOL AR was developed in conjunction with Scope AR, a global leader in developing augmented reality solutions and products for industrial clients focused around field maintenance, manufacturing, and training.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — February 24, 2021 — Scope AR, the pioneer in enterprise-class augmented reality (AR) solutions, announced today the launch of WorkLink Create, a new web-based application for quickly creating and sharing AR content within the workplace. WorkLink Create empowers aerospace, medical device and industrial professionals to quickly create their own augmented reality content without any coding or 3D modeling expertise.
“We set out to make the creation of 3D AR content as fast and easy as recording iMovie or creating a PowerPoint,” said Scott Montgomerie, CEO, Scope AR. “Using our technology platform, any user can easily author their specific knowledge into WorkLink to be widely consumed for training, complex assembly, and field service troubleshooting.”
WorkLink Create transforms AR authorship with a revolutionary, browser-based workflow that natively accepts an exceptionally broad range of CAD file formats. Users of all experience levels can log in to WorkLink Create in their browser, quickly open their engineering model files, and place them within a mixed reality scene. The users then animate motion and craft annotated work instructions in a drag-and-drop, code-free workflow similar to that of slide animations or consumer video editing applications. The AR content is published to their organization’s secure WorkLink account to be immediately consumed on any device with WorkLink installed, such as smartphones, tablets and wearables.
“AR empowers us to digitally transform our products, improve processes, and help our people learn and gain new skills,” said Tatsuya Baba, Executive Manager of NTT DATA Corporation. “Scope AR’s groundbreaking technology highlights their commitment to helping IT services companies like us succeed with our digital transformation initiatives. WorkLink Create assists in the execution of our scenario development.”
Commercial AR use cases that have been accelerated include training, commercial education, service and support of advanced medical capital equipment such as robotic surgery, COVID-19 testing equipment and sports medicine.
“WorkLink Create empowers enterprise workforces amidst the unprecedented resource constraints and travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” added Montgomerie. “We accomplished this by improving on the organizational and technical bottlenecks for AR content, thereby helping our customers to maximize continuity in their operations.”
Additionally, WorkLink has augmented operation for mobile power systems, modular data centers, aerospace manufacturing, aerospace fasteners and more. “It is just amazing to be at a point where the needs of the use case overlap with the availability of the right technology, and more importantly, the right partner: Scope AR.” said Karl Hutter, CEO of Click Bond. “We have inspired excitement with common customers, and it’s really the tip of the iceberg where we can take this.”
Lockheed Martin has used Scope AR’s technology in the Orion program to help build the next manned spacecraft into deep space.
“We are thrilled about the new horizon that WorkLink Create opens up,” said Shelley Peterson, Associate Fellow at Lockheed Martin. “We are especially excited about the automatic CAD conversion capability, as it brings lightning fast integration with our engineering models.”
This February 24th, 2021 at 9a PDT: Join our ScopeCast to be the first to find out about our new product launch — directly from the founders of the enterprise AR category.
In this 45 minute session, we will cover our vision for the future of enterprise augmented reality, how we are changing the rules, and a detailed demo of the new product.
SAN FRANCISCO – December 31 2020 – Scope AR today makes it even easier for developers to create next-generation AR integrations and deep operational analytics with the launch of the WorkLink API. This API release is the first component towards a complete development platform and greatly extends the power of WorkLink.
The WorkLink API enables Scope AR customers and partners to access a rich and flexible API endpoint to connect their IT systems of record and analytics toolsets. The developer platform will enable closed-loop functionality, such as robust deeplinking, powerful data access, a dedicated developer site, and complete documentation.
In the past, AR deployments into enterprises were limited in their operational data streams. The WorkLink API now gives Scope AR customers access to rich data needed to better optimize deployments and solve critical field challenges, improve training, and assemble complex componentry.
“The WorkLink API empowers our customers and partners to easily develop deep integrations of augmented reality into their systems” said Scott Montgomerie. “This allows them to scale their businesses robustly, despite global travel restrictions, high product complexity and attrition of experts in their workforces. And, customers will benefit from more secure integrations and powerful analytics on their operations.”
Scope AR customers will also have access to the development platform expected in early 2021, which will allow developers to test and streamline the integration of AR into their IT systems of record. Additional services will be added to the WorkLink API in the coming months. For more details about the platform, please visit www.scopear.com/developers/.
Technology has indisputably made our lives easier, but has it made us any better? (Will your new camera actually make you a better photographer?)
We can now communicate instantly, travel further, and machines have revolutionized production, but why does it still take decades of in-person teaching (or 10,000 hours) to create an expert human? You might say that, well, we won’t need expert humans… but I would argue that as products and services become increasingly more complex, they are in-fact more necessary.
To prove my point, think about the moment when your flight is about to take off, but the captain announces that there’s a problem and you have to wait hours until “they” can fix it. Who are “they” anyway? And why are “they” seemingly always in short supply? They — the Expert Humans will likely remain a single point of failure (or success) — and all the King’s, robots, carbon fiber and computers can’t put Humpty your Boeing 787 back together again, until the right “they” get here to fix it.
Despite millions of lines of code and dozens of service personnel, the fact that there’s only one expert among them means your flight is delayed.
Let’s make more of Them, then
I mentioned previously that it takes 10,000 hours to make an expert or reach mastery of a topic — and it is often true in many professions. The outcome of that time is a brain that has been through thousands of problems, situations, and developed higher order mental models for solving them. What is difficult and precious is that this person can now pattern match problems, associate solutions, and navigate around critical “gotchas.”
So how can we make 100 or even a 1000 times more of… “them”, the walking technological problem solvers? At Scope AR, we believe we can make — or convert– them on demand, and instantly.
And we do it by tightly integrating the human sensory system to the digital data system.
The Human as a Data System
If you treat the human like a data system, and you have lots of complex information to transfer, it follows that you would want dense expert knowledge to transfer through the sensory channel with the highest bandwidth.
So what are the equivalent baud rates of the senses? This has been documented in physiology literature.
Our eyes and visual circuitry are incredibly evolved: they process light intensity, color, spatial nuances— it is the information superhighway into the mind. An infamous example:
George W Bush’s 3D spatial recognition and visual nervous system performs perfectly to dodge the shoe, despite less than 250ms of time to process a threat and activate a response.
What about reading?
Reading is visual right? Can’t we ingest gigabytes of information by reading with our eyes?
Unfortunately, reading is bottlenecked by an auditory process. Yes, the eyes ingest the symbols, but those are actually converted to sounds and enter the brain through the auditory channel. It’s why you “hear” words in your head as you read. The downside is that as an upload link to a data system, it is limited to 100kbits per second, which is around 100X slower than the visual channel. It’s also why you take forever to assemble IKEA furniture the first time, but the second time through is much faster. The second time, you are “seeing” the steps through memory, and leveraging visual-spatial circuitry to guide you through the process.
Why is visual information in 3D so critical for field service?
Humans progress through what military tacticians call the OODA loop: Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Observation and Orientation are visual in nature and critical before decisions and actions can be successful. The faster technology can help humans compress these two stages of decision support, the more work can get done without any loss of precision. However, with the sky-rocketing sophistication of technology and the exponential rise of machine-to-machine operations, overall complexity is making observation and orientation even more difficult. Yet human decision support remains vital to the smooth operation of these systems of systems. The faster technology can detect anomalies, catalog symptoms and direct attention, the more a technician can focus on the critical thinking required for precise intervention and execution. The more visual the technology, the higher force multiplication of the human supercomputer.
Bringing high speed expertise into a better reality
To do this, we developed the first augmented reality for industrial enterprise environments, for the hidden layer of experts and technicians that fix your plane at the departure gate… and the results are staggering. We repeatedly see 10X faster completion rate of complex tasks, 10,000X considering skipping formal training, and 5X higher “first time right”. And we ve found that it works across industries. Consider the magnitude of making every human in your operations network 10X better.
With so many new things out there that compete to make us worse, not better— that force or distract the “them” not to be “there”… the time is now to turn our technology into a way that augments ourselves and our ultimately world.
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