Why the Aviation Industry Needs to Adopt Augmented Reality

by Scott Montgomerie | Apr 16, 2024 | Blog, Export

Traditional aircraft manufacturers are facing a crisis of public confidence: One that could have been avoided, but fortunately can be rectified.

Traditional aircraft manufacturers are facing a crisis of public confidence: One that could have been avoided, but fortunately can be rectified.

We’ve read the headlines of multiple high-profile incidents involving commercial aircraft malfunctions and maintenance issues. And we heard revelations from last month’s U.S. Congressional hearings with whistleblowers from aviation superpower Boeing that suggest an alarming prioritization of profit over customer safety. The media speculates that years of returning value to shareholders instead of investing in engineering and quality assurance has led to these failures, but it’s much more nuanced than that. 

To understand the issue, we have to examine the aviation industry itself. More specifically, we need to take a deeper look at the stalling innovation in aviation manufacturing, as well as maintenance, repair and operations – or MRO – processes. These are processes that in some cases were established decades, even generations, ago and are ripe for digital transformation.

Building and maintaining an aircraft is extremely complicated, involving many companies in the supply chain, each with thousands of factory workers and field service personnel. From our work with aviation partners, we know that the documentation of these processes for a single aircraft requires hundreds of skilled labor hours and hundreds of forms. The quality of the planes that these manufacturers produce relies heavily on each and every one of these personnel doing their jobs correctly and completely, each and every time. Yet recent examples abound of errors across these systems.  

We also know that the industry is suffering from an aging workforce that is retiring and taking with them years of institutional knowledge; and they are not being replaced. Fewer line workers must handle more, increasingly complex manufacturing processes.

How can the industry recover? By investing in advanced digital technologies that solve for the inevitable issues that arise when organizations require complex, error-free task completion from a transitioning, human workforce. We believe that augmented reality (AR) is ideally suited for this. 

AR is already being employed for enhancing training simulations, improving maintenance procedures, and providing real-time data visualization for engineers and pilots. AR also enables better situational awareness and can streamline complex tasks, ultimately reducing costs and enhancing overall performance. On the safety side, AR can provide significant added value by enhancing installation, adjustment, and inspection procedures.

AR can be integrated with already existing technologies to further enhance productivity: Manufacturers already rely heavily on computer-aided design (CAD) and product lifecycle management (PLM) software to design its planes and simulate human workflows on their factory floors. CAD models can also be used in AR to visually guide workers through the manufacturing process, virtually show anomalies between the CAD design and what was actually produced, and provide a digital, auditable capture of what tasks were performed when, and by whom. 

In essence, AR enables technicians to do their jobs more effectively, and document their work simply by doing it.

Gone are the days when technicians needed to refer to a paper manual – this method is rife with errors. By the time the technicians return to the task at hand, they may be distracted or slightly misunderstand the instruction. And in some cases they may forget to do the task completely! AR solves for all of these potential breaks in the manufacturing and MRO processes due to human error. There is precedent for AR solutions in both the Aviation and Aerospace industries, where it’s used successfully at scale in organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell, and NASA. With the industry at an inflection point and requiring a higher level of standards and best practices, and with AR technology now able to integrate with most enterprise-grade digital solutions, now is the time for all of aviation to embrace it. 

AR will address any technical issue before it turns into a PR crisis, let alone a tragic disaster. Used industry-wide, AR, in concert with existing enterprise tech, would not only improve productivity, efficiency, and quality in the aviation industry, it would support the aviation industry’s efforts in rebuilding public trust.

Scott Montgomerie is Co-founder and CEO of Scope AR

Learn more about how AR is transforming aircraft manufacturing and MRO.

Scope AR Aviation Industry Use Cases

WestJet Demo Day Augmented AME demonstration

The Future of Augmented Reality (AR) for the Enterprise

by Scott Montgomerie | Feb 2, 2024 | Blog, Export

The launch of the much-anticipated Apple Vision Pro heralds a new era of consumer productivity through spacial computing. In the enterprise, that future is here.

“In 2024 we may finally see products and apps that bring virtual augmented reality into the same functional universe as our phones and computers, maybe finally leading to mass adoption like smartphones over a decade ago.”

—Scott Stein, CNET

The release of the Apple Vision Pro is re-igniting the tech industry, 

For Scope the Vision Pro is validation of a premise we’ve been operating on for years, that AR is not just a futuristic concept but a present-day reality with powerful applications in enterprise solutions, demonstrating its capability to enhance productivity, training, and complex task execution in various industries. 

The picture above is of one of Scope AR’s co-founders, David Nedohin, in 2012, wearing a Frankenstein hacked-together pair of Epson Moverio BT100s. A customer asked us to build our own AR glasses for a trade show and, well, we did! We literally hacked the firmware to accept external video input from a computer. And with this experience, we realized we had more than a cool toy on our hands, we had the makings of an actual enterprise use case for augmented reality. 

Cut to today: Scope AR has the most scalable, most enterprise AR platform out there. And Apple has launched its version of more-or-less the same concept, the Apple Vision Pro.

The hardware has caught up to the demand for highly practical — and in the case of our customers — business-critical use cases that require precise communication of complex tasks . We’ve known for years now that AR has strong applications in manufacturing, technical training, and industrial productivity, now the Apple Vision Pro will unlock productivity across consumer productivity use cases, and boost enterprise user experience in the process.

As Scott Stein says, AR will experience a moment in 2024 and beyond. Having innovated in AR for over 10 years we have both a unique and nuanced view on what it can do now and where it’s heading.

Here’s what AR looks like In 2024: 

AR has use cases—

We’ve seen AR evolve from emerging technology to mature enterprise solution and we would argue that AR is what it has been for years — practical, an effective productivity tool — but now broadly no longer tied exclusively to gaming or virtual escape from reality.

In fact, AR is uniquely positioned to improve the outcomes in several critical use cases. Take learning and skill development. Our enterprise customers have reported up to 90% improvement in time to train and certify staff, customers, and technicians on shop floor activities and other technical skills. This is because AR moves learning into applied practice, where the learning and retention rate is higher. We anticipate considerable acceleration of applied learning as tools like the Vision Pro broaden the usage and application of AR to our everyday work.

AR is Enterprise

In our early days, even with clear-cut use cases, it was challenging expanding from early piloting of AR driven by research or Innovation teams to actual usage on the shop floor. But today AR platforms like WorLink offer an end-to-end enterprise solution, and innovations in hardware, data integrations, IoT, and AI have furthered the Digital Thread by uniting systems across product lifecycle management, the shop floor, and manufacturing execution.

And the enterprise is now applying AR cross-functionally, across use cases and teams. Take Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) Group, one of the world’s leading industrial groups, spanning energy, logistics & infrastructure, and industrial machinery. We’ve seen the applications of our WorkLink platform to their business expand even beyond the initial use cases of manufacturing work instructions. Beyond the shop floor for work instructions and training,  their customers have adopted it as a support tool, enabling a higher-level service level. Even further, their sales organization has adopted AR for demo and training of sales staff. For MHI, AR is an amazing accelerator, enabling them to convey complex information easily across the enterprise.

AR is a productivity tool: For years, AR simulations were more entertaining than useful; for many Pokemon GO was our first exposure to the possibilities of the technology. Today, it simply enables us to get from Point A to mission critical Point B faster, with fewer of the frictions you would encounter in the physical world.

Take aviation – a highly regulated industry. Aviation maintenance, repair, and operations, or MRO, is highly technical, requiring years of training for tech ops professionals to have the required certifications to perform standard operational inspections of airplanes, each of which requires hundreds of documents that must be completed and scanned into a digital database. AR can accelerate not only the inspection training process, but the documentation process.

This video of our customer, West Jet, shows former aircraft maintenance engineer Brandon Gamble, now on West Jet’s elite troubleshooting unit, leveraging AR through our WorkLink platform to automate the inspection process. Anomalies can be spotted and rectified, and documentation digitally filed, in real-time. 

In a talk he gave to WestJet employees explaining how his organization was thinking about productivity, and how AR could accelerate it, Gandeephan Ganeshalingam, Vice President Technical Operations at WestJet said it best,

“What if we documented our work, simply by doing our work?”

Gandeephan, we quite agree.

AR is enhanced by AI. You can’t talk about the advancements of AR without acknowledging the impact of AI on, well, everything. As pioneers in Enterprise AR, and knew we needed to address AI in some way, but not superficially, only in a way that would amplify and accelerate the known capabilities of AR. 

We had proven that AR could accelerate productivity for our customers by enabling anyone to achieve mastery over complex tasks. From there we asked ourselves: How can AI help us do that faster, better? The answer became obvious to us: by accelerating content creation, or the authoring, process.

Many of the use cases we support are highly complex, highly technical, and require an understanding of both engineering and computer-aided design, or CAD, which helps users create designs in 3D to visualize construction, and enables the development, modification, and optimization of the design process   We saw AI as bridging the gap in knowledge between design engineer and end user – from CAD drawings to the shop floor. 

With years of experience supporting the development of AR experiences, we’ve virtually seen content creation for complex tasks a million times. And with that experience digitized we have a data library that can automate content creation, we could activate with AI, dynamically bringing insights into the content creation process to customers. 

With all of these data and insights an AI customer self-serve chatbot was possible – and also just table stakes. In 2024 we’re incorporating our ingrained knowledge of content creation and best practices into our WorkLink platform, freeing up customers to execute training, remote assistance, work instructions faster. More on that later this year.

Scott Montgomerie is Co-Founder and CEO of Scope AR.

Qualcomm’s Market Opportunity: The Android of AR Glasses?

by Scott Montgomerie | Aug 7, 2023 | Blog, Export

While everyone is looking to Apple’s VisionPro to take Augmented Reality mainstream, Qualcomm has been quietly developing the technology to take over a huge market opportunity for years. 

As I explained in this article, building AR glasses is hard, very hard. The AR glasses we all want inherently have many competing demands, often centering around the battery and form factor. You want a larger field of view? It needs a bigger battery. You want better tracking? Bigger battery. Better graphics? Bigger battery. You want to wear it for hours? Bigger battery with longer battery life. Oh wait, it’s too heavy? That means smaller battery, smaller field of view, smaller processor. Balancing this equation has been the bane of many device manufacturers’ existence.

Additionally, very few manufacturers have the vertical integration capabilities required to produce a great user experience – you need tight integration of the cameras, silicon, memory, displays, form factor and UX.

iOS vs Android, the Sequel

Only a few companies have the tight integration mentioned above end-to-end, those being Google and Apple, but there are a few companies in the world that do have the capability to tackle a big segment of the stack, and this is where the opportunity lies.

But first, let me take you all the way back to 2007, when Google acquired Android. Back then, Android was a tiny startup few people had heard about, and the iPhone was only beginning to make waves. Fast forward to today, and Android runs on 71% of the world’s mobile devices. Android can be found on $30 phones found in Africa, all the way up to the Galaxy-class Samsung phones that compete with the highest-end iPhones. 

While Apple dominates the high-end smartphone market, and the high-end laptop market for that matter (and earphones, and tablets, and watches), there is a very healthy market for the long-tail. And what powers the majority of the long-tail? Android. Android allowed the hardware OEMs to focus on their unique ability, building phones, while Android took care of everything else – basic apps like email, an app store, security, etc.  

And so is the opportunity with AR glasses. While everyone expects Apple to build the AR glasses that will finally break into the mainstream market, there is an opportunity to be the Android of AR glasses.

Qualcomm’s Exciting Market Opportunity 

Now, building a vertically integrated hardware platform is substantially more difficult than building an operating system such as Android. And this is where Qualcomm has a unique opportunity.

Qualcomm’s XR2 chip was behind the revolution of consumer VR, powering the Meta Quest lineup. Before the XR2 chip, head-mounted tracking involved a lot of not great solutions, but moving the computations into hardware contributed to making consumer VR viable. 

Coming back to the competing demands I mentioned earlier – one solution to the battery problem is to make everything more efficient. To do that, you need better chips, and chips that are purpose-built and close to the hardware. This is where Qualcomm’s AR2 chip comes in.

Qualcomm’s AR2 chip is  a multi-chip platform, capable of optimizing the computations for perception, AI and graphics in a single chip, while offloading other computations to a phone over a high bandwidth, low latency Wifi 7 connection. Essentially, this means that this architecture unifies a significant portion of the stack I mentioned above – a tight integration with the cameras, silicon, memory, displays, and form factor.

And just like Android, Qualcomm is working with OEMs to do what they’re uniquely good at – building hardware. And this is the final piece – Snapdragon Spaces. Just like Android, Snapdragon Spaces allows app developers to write once, run anywhere, on any Android phone.

Qualcomm could build the next Android for AR Glasses

The opportunity ahead for Qualcomm is for Spaces to become the Android for AR Glasses. By leveraging their unique position to optimize everything required for AR Glasses, and working with OEMs, everyone who wants to compete with Apple will look for a platform capable of supporting their vision. 

For OEMs, the way to differentiate themselves from competitors will be on form factor. For example, if you’re looking for a field service use case, you’ll want a lighter, cheaper set of glasses, and you’ll likely settle for a less capable device. For heavy manufacturing, you’ll want safety glasses and precise hologram alignment, resulting in a heavier, but more capable device. This would be analogous to ruggedized devices today, but with AR glasses, the opportunity to differentiate for individual use cases will be much more compelling.

For app developers like Scope AR, this is exciting, because building a spatial app that can run WorkLink’s work instructions, with a uniform user interface, means that we can spend less time maintaining individual code bases, and more time innovating and building features customers want. Every customer has unique hardware requirements, and the more variety of AR glasses out there, the more the benefits of AR can reach front line workers.

It’s an exciting time for augmented reality all around, and we can’t wait to see this inflection point take off over the next few years!