AWE2019 was once again the place to be for everybody in the augmented reality industry. With it's 10 years anniversary, AWE marked the transition from early adopters to early majority augmented reality solutions.
Iristick had the pleasure to be invited to the sneak preview of Digi-capital’s report about the industry in the run-up to this year's show.
Three trends are the key takeaways from this Google-hosted event:
- The industrial business cases (ROI) are clear and more and more companies move from pilot to project. A significant business case for consumers is still missing.
- Mobile AR is dominant (850Million installations) and the gap between AR/VR headsets is still important (less than 20Million)
- Smart glasses infliction-point is on the blink of happening(2020).
More and more enterprise use cases show promising results.
Especially this last point is something we, at iristick, have observed at this year's show. Companies that are looking for a remote assistance solution or who want to make the transition from paper-based SOP's to digital procedures, could find a variety of solutions both in hardware and software. Iristick and several other smart glasses vendors presented commercially available products that meet and exceed the demands of customers. Multiple presentations during the conference show-cased customer testimonials. With a focus on the business case, they showed the very promising result of reduction in errors, lower factory downtime and especially, increased productivity (digital procedures).
Hands-free worker first.
We, at iristick, enjoyed the presentation from Sanjay Jhawar (Chief product Officer at our competitor Realwear). We fully agree with his observation that there is a huge difference between a training environment (where immersive hardware can be used) and the real world. Real world situations require smart glasses that put the hands-free worker first. He called it the difference between "Safety reduced" (training) and "safety enhanced" (real world). We couldn't agree more. The iristick Z1 smart safety glasses are designed and engineered to meet all the demanding requirement in this "safety enhanced"-environment.
Phone-tethered smart glasses solutions have become accepted.
One final observation is worth mentioning and comes again from the Digi-capital AWE2019-keynote. Industry leaders rank a potential smart glasses from Apple as number 3. Although Apple has not announced that it is working on smart glasses, it illustrates that the industry has fully accepted phone-tethered solutions. Iristick has been using this architecture since the beginning because it offers all the processing power of a smartphone without the downsides of heating and radiation near the temple.
AWE2019 was a real success for Iristick. We hope to see all of you back next year. And if you are planning to launch a smart glasses project, then make sure to contact us.