Scope AR’s $9.7M Series A

Scope AR’s $9.7M Series A

I’m ecstatic to announce that Scope AR has raised a $9.7M Series A! This follows a strong year for Scope AR and we’re on track to have an even better 2019. We’re so excited to have the resources we need to grow and to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that lies before us, which is nothing less than transforming how people perform work in the heavy industries. We’re just at the beginning of the journey with augmented reality-enabled applications, and we have a clear and expanding vision of what is needed to become the global leader in workforce knowledge management.

When we built our first augmented reality project back in 2012, we were blown away by the market opportunity that presented itself, and today is another milestone in enabling front line workers to receive the information they need to do their jobs more effectively. It’s only a matter of time before this technology is in the hands of every blue-collar worker, and it’s extremely exciting to be on the front lines of this world-changing technology, particularly with the recent advances in hardware which are finally allowing our dream to come to fruition.

In 2018, Apple and Google both got into the AR game with ARKit and ARCore, and Microsoft made a big push with their Hololens headset. With the support of these hardware players and billions of devices ready to take advantage of this amazing technology, AR seems ready to take off, and Scope AR is poised to take advantage of this changing landscape. The core ethos around the company is knowledge transfer – getting knowledge into a worker’s hands as soon as possible, enabling them to have the knowledge they need, when they need it. We have accomplished that goal in a couple of core capabilities:

  • Remote AR (Remote Assistance), the first AR-enabled remote assistance app, which allows a front-line technician to obtain knowledge and collaborate with someone who has that knowledge in real time, with the enabling technology of augmented reality providing that key communication medium that you just don’t get with FaceTime or Skype.
  • WorkLink, the first no-code authoring platform, which allows non-technical users to create intuitive, visual work instructions for virtually any worker to receive intuitive, visual guided instructions for the purposes of training, maintenance, or assembly.

And we aren’t done yet! Stay tuned for some great announcements in the next few months.

Continuing to look ahead, Scope AR will use this round of capital to grow our sales and marketing teams, as well as our development teams. We have an extensive roadmap to build to become the global leader in workforce knowledge management. To help guide us in this journey, I’m extremely happy to welcome Wayne Hu of SignalFire and Krishna K. Gupta of Romulus Capital to the board of directors.

I’m very excited about the future and what we’ll be able to achieve with these additional resources. And if you’re looking to join a rockstar team with huge ambitions to change the world – we’re hiring!

Scope AR Closes $9.7 Million Series A Funding to Help Make Any Worker An Instant Expert with Augmented Reality

Thriving enterprise AR company continues growth and demonstrated success with Fortune 500 leaders including Lockheed Martin and Unilever

SAN FRANCISCO, March 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Scope AR, the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality (AR) solutions, today announced it has secured a $9.7 million round of Series A funding. The round was led by Romulus Capital, with follow-on investment participation from existing investors SignalFire, Susa Ventures, Haystack, New Stack Ventures, North American Corporation and Angel List. Krishna Gupta of Romulus Capital and Wayne Hu from SignalFire will join Scope AR’s Board of Directors.

“AR is becoming an important tool for how knowledge is shared within heavy industry, allowing workers to get the information they need, when they need it, in an intuitive way,” said Scott Montgomerie, CEO and co-founder of Scope AR. “We are thrilled to have the support of our new and existing investors to accelerate our growth and development during a crucial inflection point in the market. It underscores, yet again, that enterprise AR is a leading driver within mixed reality thanks to the impressive ROI and growing list of use cases the technology enables.”

With this latest infusion of capital, the company has a raised a total of $15.8 million, which will allow the company to further scale and expand enterprise AR adoption in a time when the industrial workforce is shifting and machinery and equipment are becoming increasingly complex. The company is among the first to deliver noteworthy ROI from real-world customer use cases across aerospace, consumer packaged goods and manufacturing industries. Using the company’s products – WorkLink and Remote AR – industry leaders such as Lockheed Martin, Unilever and Prince Castlehave achieved impactful results around improving worker efficiencies, reducing equipment downtime and more accurately diagnosing repair issues.

“Enterprises are now realizing that leveraging AR and other agile, remote software solutions can be the answer to many operational challenges they have always faced — from closing the growing skills gap to reducing downtime,” said Krishna K. Gupta, founder and general partner of Romulus Capital. “Scope AR’s product leadership and vision has put them at the forefront of the industry, addressing these challenges with tools that provide workers with instant access to critical information that helps resolve operational issues in an agile and accurate manner. We’re excited about their product roadmap and growth opportunities as we work more closely with some of the largest enterprises in the world.”

About Scope AR
Scope AR is the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality solutions, delivering the industry’s only cross-platform AR tools for getting workers the knowledge they need, when they need it. The company is revolutionizing the way enterprises work and collaborate by offering AR tools that provide more effective and efficient knowledge-sharing to conduct complex remote tasks, employee training, product and equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, field and customer support, and more. The company’s device-agnostic technology supports smartphones, tablets and wearables, making it easy for leading organizations like Boeing, Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Assa Abloy, GE and others to quickly scale their use of AR to any remote worker. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco with offices in Edmonton, Canada.

How Augmented Reality is Modernizing Manufacturing

How Augmented Reality is Modernizing Manufacturing

Manufacturing.net

January 31, 2019 – Scott Montgomerie:

The manufacturing industry has a long history of constant innovation. In this “man versus machine” industry, there has always been a precarious balance between innovation and having the right labor force to successfully drive these innovations. A new skills gap study by Deloitte predicts that 4.6 million new manufacturing jobs will be created in the U.S. between 2018 and 2028. More than half (2.4 million) of these new jobs are predicted to be unfilled.

“Why?” you may ask. As an aging workforce is soon walking out the door, taking with them years of expert knowledge, the manufacturing industry is now facing tremendous pressure to do more with less.  Costs of equipment, product assembly, and workforce training are continuing to rise. At the same time, technology is driving an even greater need for a skilled labor force as the complexity of machines and manufacturing equipment is also increasing. These drivers are creating new challenges for manufacturing companies to identify innovative ways to save time, cut costs and ensure their more generalist workforce has the knowledge they need to successfully complete their jobs.

Augmented Reality (AR) is proving to be one of the most impactful technologies influencing the manufacturing industry, helping many enterprises in the space overcome current obstacles. Workers can now connect in real-time to get the expert help they need, reducing errors and equipment downtime. Knowledge experts even have the ability to share predefined AR-driven work instructions for common problems in the field. AR technologies can also jump start training processes by circumventing the need for large volumes of paperwork instructions or user manuals. Workers can access intuitive AR content on-demand, which is overlaid on top of a piece of equipment or machine in the real world, dramatically reducing the time it takes to reach a certain competency level or even learning a new procedure on the fly.

A perfect example of how AR is transforming the manufacturing world is with Lockheed Martin, an American global aerospace company, and their current project of building the Orion spaceship. Historically, aerospace companies have been dependent on paper manuals (sometimes thousands of pages in length) to access detailed manufacturing instructions. As you can imagine, building a spacecraft takes incredible precision—it’s a “measure twice, cut once” scenario magnified to the extreme. Using AR, Lockheed Martin’s Space division technicians can now see digital information and assembly instructions overlaid onto components of the spacecraft. The results have been dramatic. They have seen a 35-50 percent reduction in overall technician time, a 90-99 percent reduction in the time it takes technicians to interpret drawings and text instructions and an 85 percent reduction in overall time for training.

Unilever, a British-Dutch transnational consumer goods company, is another great use case where AR is driving dramatic ROI.  They are using real-time remote assistance AR technologies to connect workers on the factory line with experts located in a different part of their campus. This enables manufacturing factory line workers to solve problems quickly and dramatically reduce downtown of essential equipment. They have experienced a 50 percent reduction in overall downtime and an impressive 1,700+ percent ROI relative to their cost of using the AR solution.

A final example is with Prince Castle, a manufacturer of steaming, toasting and smallwares technology. Prince Castle supplies the leading, global fast food chain with food preparation and other kitchen equipment such as toasters. When their highly specialized equipment becomes inoperable, Prince Castle contracts with general contractors in local markets to come onsite and assess the problem. Using an AR-based live video calling solution, these general contractors can quickly and accurately diagnose the problem and get immediate remote expert advice to fix the equipment. As a result of adopting AR solutions, Prince Castle has experienced an amazing 100 percent success rate in diagnosing the problem on the first visit, a reduction of 50 percent of the service trips needed to properly repair a piece of equipment and a 50-80 percent reduction in labor spend.

With a dwindling labor force coupled with an increased need for highly trained and specialized workers, the importance of technologies like AR will play an increasingly critical role in the manufacturing industry. Early adopters have already realized they must transform business processes to improve worker efficiency, reduce equipment downtime and maintenance costs, and more accurately diagnose and resolve support and repair issues—and that AR can be the answer to these challenges. More and more manufacturers will realize the benefits AR can deliver and its impact will become even more pervasive in the years ahead.

Scott Montgomerie is the co-founder and CEO of Scope AR.

Why manufacturing needs augmented reality

Why manufacturing needs augmented reality

Plastics Today

January, 30 2019 – Norbert Sparrow:

Remember Glass? When Google introduced its augmented reality (AR) eyewear, the initial excitement faded into disdain for early adopters, who earned a memorable nickname: Glassholes. The user affectation, as well as the cost and paucity of reasons to actually use them in nature, doomed AR wearables in the consumer electronics space, at least for now. But that changes if you look to the factory or shop floor, writes Jake Swearingen in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine. “In such settings, augmented-reality smart glasses are already being deployed across a wide swath of industries.” Scott Montgomerie, CEO and co-founder of Scope AR (San Francisco, CA), was an early advocate of AR in the manufacturing space and has played a key role in its adoption at companies such as Lockheed Martin and GE. He will speak to his experience at the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Summit during the co-located PLASTEC West and Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West event in Anaheim, CA, on Feb. 5 to 7, 2019. In advance of the event, he shared some perspectives on the technology with PlasticsToday.

The eureka moment regarding AR opportunities in manufacturing came to Montgomerie at a mining convention in Las Vegas. “We began playing around with AR in 2012, when a big mining company came to Scope AR, asking if our technology could be used for training. We did a proof of concept, which went really well, and the company asked us to bring it to a trade show in Las Vegas later that year.” The demo was an instant hit, with a constant stream of attendees telling Montgomerie and his colleagues that it was “the coolest thing” at the show. “And we were, like, really? Because those giant mining trucks with wheels bigger than your living room looked really cool to us!” recalled Montgomerie. Nevertheless, the die was cast. Scope AR started getting contracts from the likes of Toyota, Boeing and NASA. By 2015, “we decided that this platform was going to scale and there needed to be an easy way to create instructions and interact,” said Montgomerie.

Scope AR’s WorkLink allows users with no prior coding skills to create rich AR smart instructions that automatically collect data and provide actionable insights, which can be deployed globally through an app. Instead of rifling through paper instructions, users are immersed in computer-generated 3D imagery that overlays on top of the real world, explains the company on its website. The software is platform agnostic—”we want people to be able to use the technology they feel comfortable with,” explained Montgomerie—and is also the first authoring system to provide full support for Microsoft’s HoloLens system. The company also offers Remote AR, which allows a worker to collaborate remotely with an expert, both of whom are seeing the same thing as if they were standing side by side. The possibilities and efficiencies that can be achieved are head spinning.

Using a HoloLens, for example, instructions can be overlaid on a part or piece of equipment using 3D models to perform maintenance or assemble a part, explained Montgomerie. Human error is dramatically reduced and efficiency skyrockets. Montgomerie cites Unilever, which reported an astonishing return on investment of more than 1,700%, and Lockheed Martin, which reduced manufacturing time by 50%.

“I’m particularly fond of the Lockheed Martin use case, which involves the space shuttle,” Montgomerie told PlasticsToday. It is making a “capsule with 3000 fasteners that need to be tightened. The old way of doing it was to paw through a 3000-page binder, look up the table, find the fastener in question, look up the torque setting, crawl into a tight space to get to the fastener, set the torque, do quality assurance to verify it was tightened properly, and rinse and repeat 3000 times,” said Montgomerie. “Our AR technology shows the technician where the fastener is and on top of that displays the torque setting. Productivity was improved by 50%,” said Montgomerie.

If the task is more complex and requires expert assistance, Remote AR offers a time-saving solution. “Suppose you have a part that doesn’t fit and you need to reach out to a manufacturing engineer or even the OEM,” explained Montgomerie. To help out, typically the expert would have to physically come to the shop floor. That could take days in some cases. With our technology, they can communicate over video in real time and real space across synchronized devices.”

Employee training is another area where AR is revolutionizing processes in organizations as disparate as the U.S. military and Walmart. Writing in Forbes, AR and virtual reality entrepreneur Lorne Fade notes that Microsoft has made a $480 million deal with the U.S. Army to train troops for complex, dangerous real-world situations via AR and that Walmart has partnered with Oculus and Strivr to teach personnel internal processes in an immersive AR-enabled way. For Montgomerie, AR technology may even represent a partial solution to the skills gap.

“It takes a lot of time to gain expertise—10,000 hours, right? What if you could receive instructions that are so intuitive that you wouldn’t have to memorize them?” said Montgomerie. “You can store tons of information on the internet and then you become the actuator.”

The skills gap is heightened as baby boomers retire en masse. “All of that knowledge is literally walking out the door,” said Montgomerie. “A feature that we are working on is the capability of recording interactions. As the technician is receiving instructions from an expert, the video, audio and 3D adaptation, on a separate channel, are being recorded. Later, you can go back and replay that interaction on top of that piece of equipment.” When the expert retires, his knowledge stays with the company and continues to educate young workers.

The power of AR in these scenarios and countless others resides in the richness of the communication channel. “The user interface allows you to communicate in a much more natural way. Now we’re interacting with real and virtual objects in a real world setting and that neatly solves so many problems that stem from a misinterpretation of instructions. Montgomerie cites an example that almost everyone on the planet can relate to: Assembling Ikea furniture.

“An expert attempts to communicate through diagrams, but the technician, or consumer in this example, misunderstands those instructions and uses the wrong fastener or beam. With AR, you can see the pieces overlaid on top of the furniture in 3D, and you will certainly make fewer mistakes. Through that form of communication, you viscerally understand what you need to do versus trying to interpret instructions,” said Montgomerie.

And that’s the crux of it: Whether you’re assembling a Dagstorp sofa or tightening screws on a space shuttle component, AR reduces human error and accelerates the process. No wonder that the AR market is forecast to grow at 75% CAGR through 2024, exceeding $50 billion by 2024, according to Market Study Report LLC.

Montgomerie will lead a discussion devoted to modernizing manufacturing with augmented reality at the co-located Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West and PLASTEC West event in Anaheim, CA. The presentation, scheduled for Feb. 7 at 10:15 AM, is part of the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Summit. MD&M West and PLASTEC West will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center from Feb. 5 to 7, 2019.

2019: The year AR finally goes from “unsexy” to cool?

2019: The year AR finally goes from “unsexy” to cool?

December 18, 2018 – Greg Nichols:

The AR Cloud, ruggedized hardware, and a consumer-friendly app ecosystem. Could 2019 be the year this technology breaks out of the novelty phase?

Augmented Reality is still pretty lame. Sorry, I know that’s a broad brush to paint an increasingly diverse technology category, but that’s my professional opinion.

On the enterprise side, AR is finally showing some indications of becoming genuinely useful, particularly in sectors like field service, but adoption has been uneven. On the consumer side, it’s pretty much all face swaps and cheesy marketing “experiences” crafted for brands conned by marketing teams into thinking they’re in danger of missing a phantom wave of mixed reality adoption.

But if AR is still sputtering, it’s equally true the category has tremendous potential and is bound to change the way we interact with and interpret our world.

To get some insight on how and where AR will progress in 2019, I reached out to Scott Montgomerie, co-founder and CEO of Scope AR, a company that crafts enterprise AR solutions for various industries. Here are three areas where we can expect significant leaps forward in 2019.

HARDWARE WILL BECOME MORE RUGGEDIZED

There’s a big barrier inhibiting AR adoption right now: Many of the sectors that could most benefit from AR require workers to go into demanding environments that are brutal on hardware.

“While more and more companies are using AR glasses or headsets,” says Montgomerie, “they are still fragile and expensive. As such, users are hesitant to bring them to high risk environments, such as a construction site or an oil rig, where they could easily get broken.”

That should change in 2019. Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 is expected to launch, likely adding durability to one of the most popular enterprise headsets. More than 75 percent of respondents in Digi-Capital’s Augmented/Virtual Reality Report pointed to Microsoft HoloLens as the smartglasses platform that matters most to their company.

Several other companies, including Apple, are working on AR devices as well, and it’s a sure bet they’re eyeing use cases that will require a measure of durability.

PROGRESS AROUND THE AR CLOUD WILL LEAD TO A NEW LEVEL OF COLLABORATION

Some definitions are in order. The AR Cloud is a digital copy of the real world that’s accessible to everyone, and it’s going to be really important. How important?

“The AR Cloud will be the single most important software infrastructure in computing, far more valuable than Facebook’s social graph or Google’s pagerank index,” says Augmented World Expo Founder and CEO Ori Inbar.

That statement makes sense if you can envision a future in which digital information about people, objects, and places will be derived not from Googling them using text but from training a camera at them. When a publicly accessible digital copy of the real world is complete, training an AR device at just about anything will yield a wealth of information.

There’s a race underway now to control the AR Cloud. Google, which has paved the way with its Street View efforts, is firmly in the lead, but there’s been a groundswell of activity in the area.

“The progress being made on the AR Cloud will unlock a new set of use cases and allow co-workers (or consumers) to communicate in an unprecedented way that’s more precise and location-specific,” Montgomerie told me. “Several startups who are working solely on AR Cloud development came out of stealth mode this year.”

Among the most promising efforts, the Open AR Cloud Organization was unveiled at AWE EU in mid-October.

Because an AR Cloud will be interoperable and available to everyone, it promotes multiplayer AR experiences. Two people working on an oil rig can access complementary technical and sensor data in real time, for instance, aiding enterprise collaboration. Two consumers will be able to enjoy the same AR experience on different devices, bringing a social aspect to a technology that’s been single player so far.

2019 IS THE YEAR IN WHICH WE’LL SEE THE LAUNCH OF THE INDUSTRY’S FIRST PRACTICAL CONSUMER APPLICATIONS

Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore debuted in the second half of 2017. That timing is important, because it means developers and startups have now had enough time to get their feet wet with the technology and gauge market response to begin producing meaningful consumer apps.

“About a year and a half after the original Apple App store launched, developers finally learned how to leverage a touch screen to build engaging and useful user interfaces, and app development exploded,” explains Montgomerie. “AR app development requires a whole new way of thinking. Much like the iPhone’s user experience required a transition from mouse-and-keyboard interaction to touch, AR experiences require a new method of interaction.”

Fortunately, Montgomerie believes developers are and consumers alike are becoming fluent in these new modes of technology interaction.

“We’re starting to see the signs that mobile AR is following the same growth trajectory as mobile apps.”

If that’s true, expect the technology to finally escape the doldrums of face swaps and tacky brand promotions in the year ahead.

NASA is using HoloLens AR headsets to build its new spacecraft faster

NASA is using HoloLens AR headsets to build its new spacecraft faster

MIT Technology Review
October 9, 2018 – Erin Winick:

Lockheed Martin engineers wear the goggles to help them assemble the crew capsule Orion—without having to read thousands of pages of paper instructions.

When you work at a factory that pumps out thousands of a single item, like iPhones or shoes, you quickly become an expert in the assembly process. But when you are making something like a spacecraft, that comfort level doesn’t come quite so easily.

“Just about every time, we are building something for the first time,” says Brian O’Connor, the vice president of production operations at Lockheed Martin Space.

Traditionally, aerospace organizations have replied upon thousand-page paper manuals to relay instructions to their workers. In recent years, firms like Boeing and Airbus have started experimenting with augmented reality, but it’s rarely progressed beyond the testing phase. At Lockheed, at least, that’s changing. The firm’s employees are now using AR to do their jobs every single day.

Spacecraft technician Decker Jory uses a Microsoft HoloLens headset on a daily basis for his work on Orion, the spacecraft intended to one day sit atop the powerful—and repeatedly delayed—NASA Space Launch System. “At the start of the day, I put on the device to get accustomed to what we will be doing in the morning,” says Jory. He takes the headset off when he is ready to start drilling. For now, the longest he can wear it without it getting uncomfortable or too heavy is about three hours. So he and his team of assemblers use it to learn a task or check the directions in 15-minute increments rather than for a constant feed of instructions.

In the headset, the workers can see holograms displaying models that are created through engineering design software from Scope AR. Models of parts and labels are overlaid on already assembled pieces of spacecraft. Information like torquing instructions—how to twist things—can be displayed right on top of the holes to which they are relevant, and workers can see what the finished product will look like.

The virtual models around the workers are even color-coded to the role of the person using the headset. For Jory’s team, which is currently constructing the heat shield skeleton of Orion, the new technology takes the place of a 1,500-page binder full of written work instructions.

Lockheed is expanding its use of augmented reality after seeing some dramatic effects during testing. Technicians needed far less time to get familiar with and prepare for a new task or to understand and perform processes like drilling holes and twisting fasteners.

These results are prompting the organization to expand its ambitions for the headsets: one day it hopes to use them in space. Lockheed Martin’s head of emerging technologies, Shelley Peterson, says the way workers use the headsets back here on Earth gives insight into how augmented reality could help astronauts maintain the spacecraft the firm helped build. “What we want astronauts to be able to do is have maintenance capability that’s much more intuitive than going through text or drawing content,” says Peterson.

For now, these headsets still need some adjustments to increase their wearability and ease of use before they can be used in space. Creating the content the workers see is getting easier, but it still takes a lot of effort. O’Connor sees these as obstacles that can be overcome quickly, though.

“If you were to look five years down the road, I don’t think you will find an efficient manufacturing operation that doesn’t have this type of augmented reality to assist the operators,” he says.