IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 18

googLe gLass
is dead, but augMented
reaLity Lives on
industrial and enterprise apps are
the near-term future of ar

It seeme d like t he na scent
augmented-reality industry was
on a roller coaster at the start of the
year. Things looked bad when Google
announced that it was terminating sales
of its Glass headset in favor of developing some new version to be announced
at some time in the future. (Possibly in
a galaxy far, far away.) But then the
future looked bright again when
Microsoft unveiled its HoloLens
AR headset at a razzle-dazzle press
event in late January.
But the truth is that well before
the debut of HoloLens, the AR ecosystem had been moving away from
Google's model of always-available
wearable computing and toward the
idea that AR headsets should be-
at least for now-something you
use only for specific tasks. At the
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in
Las Vegas just after New Year's, most of
the capabilities advertised a few weeks
later by Microsoft for its HoloLens prototypes were already on display on the
show floor (albeit spread among several
exhibitors), and they were mostly doing
industrial and enterprise work.
One example was a US $5,000 industrial headset from San Francisco-based
Osterhaut Design Group. Unlike Glass,
whose single display is tucked away at
the far side of the frame, occupying a
small corner of the wearer's field of view,
ODG's binocular system delivers graphics front and center. Flipping down a
sunglasses-like visor blocks the wearer's
view of the outside world and converts
the headset from augmented reality to
18

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nORTh aMERICan

virtual reality. (A $1,000 consumer version is planned for release later this year.)
Similarly, Epson was showing its
Moverio BT-200 smart glasses. Most
important, Epson didn't bring just the
glasses; it also brought third-party developers with examples of AR applications.
While some developers were showing

game and entertainment software, the
most impressive demos were aimed firmly
at enterprise and government users.
A Moverio demo by Herndon, Va.-based
APX Labs featured Skylight, a system for
field workers. When I tried it, arrows
popped up on my view of the conference
to indicate the direction of distant wind
turbines. When I looked in that direction,
I could call up data on the turbine's performance and even see video of it.
Augumenta, headquartered in Oulu,
Finland, eliminated the need for voice
commands-always tricky in noisy work
environments-with a system that can
recognize hand gestures. I used it to play
rock-paper-scissors, but ultimately the
technology should allow a wearer to see
a keyboard or industrial controls over-

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laid on the palm of one hand and "press"
them using a finger from the other hand.
At the Moverio demo by Ngrain, of
Vancouver, Canada, a scale model of an
electric generator sat on the table. Once
I put on the glasses, I could look at the
model and highlight a particular part,
causing a 3-D representation of that piece,
overlaid on the generator, to pop up. The
3-D models tracked the changing perspective as I turned and moved my head,
albeit with some jitter in the image.
Finally, I used the Moverio glasses to
look at a pump mechanism using an app
made by Scope AR, based in Edmonton,
Alberta. Looking at the pump through
the Moverio glasses allowed me to watch
a series of instructions for performing
maintenance, with virtual tools such as a
wrench overlaid on the areas where they
would be used on the real pump, plus an
animation of the required motion.
And even though HoloLens is targeted firmly at the consumer, Microsoft's presentation emphasized its
usefulness for physical tasks. Like the
AR instruments at CES, the HoloLens
makes no attempt to emulate Google
Glass's minimal intrusion into the
wearer's field of view: The headset
looks like a pair of ski goggles. The system can track eye movements, listen
to voice commands, and follow hand
gestures much as a Microsoft Kinect
does. (Alex Kipman at Microsoft developed both the Kinect and the HoloLens.)
At its press event, Microsoft put users
into an immersive version of the popular Minecraft world-building game, but it
also showed several equipment maintenance and installation demos similar to
those seen at CES. Even the use of handgesture interfaces wasn't new. OVSR also
demoed it at CES, combining its Razer
headset with a gesture-detection sensor
from Leap Motion.
We may yet see headsets displace the
smartphone as the universal portable
networked computer du jour, but it looks
like we'll first be taking a detour through
living-room entertainment and factoryfloor maintenance. -stephen cass
with ch a r les q. choi

Photo-illustration: randi klett; Photos: Getty iMaGes

nEwS

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015