The Future is a Digital Thing
-A look into digital technologies and their relevance.

A discussion on the role of smart glasses in the Industry 4.0 context firstly requires a classification on the different types of smart glasses. A taxonomy for smart eyewear allows to map use cases and business requirements of the industry with the strengths and weaknesses of each class. The gap between business reality and hardware aspiration is the basis to discuss future trends and the expected evolution. Smart glasses are a key component to provide human-centered support and to connect the desk-less operator with the IoT and other elements of the cyber-physical factory of the future.

Panel with Optinvent, Vuzix, Glassup

Optinvent:
1. Optinvent’s patented see-through display technology:
- Developed for low cost and high volume manufacturing
- Brighter virtual image vs. others
-Better power consumption (up to 5 hours of battery life)
2. Optinvent’s products use the patented “Flip-Vu” feature
-Allows the virtual image position to be either above, below, or centered to the wearer’s vision.
-Better ergonomics for prolonged use
3. Performance is not compromised vs. cost competitiveness
- At 700 €, Optinvent’s product is very competitive although it maintains a high level of performance (full standalone wireless android computer, true optical see-through, GPS, 9 axis sensor, BT, WiFi, camera, memory, sound, microphone, great battery life, etc.)

GlassUp:
GlassUp eyeglasses are fashionable notification glasses following a "less is more" concept and focused on aesthetics and comfort of use. They have the appearance of designer eyeglasses, no camera, a bluetooth low energy connection with the smartphone of the user, so that the batteries last a full day. The information is displayed to one eye only, in monochrome green. The choice of apps determines the content displayed to the user.

VUZIX:
A leading supplier of smart glasses, and Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies and products for the consumer and enterprise markets. Vuzix holds 43 patents and 23 additional patents pending and numerous IP licenses in the Video Eyewear field. The Company has won Consumer Electronics Show (or CES) awards for innovation for the years 2005 to 2016 and several wireless technology innovation awards among others. Founded in 1997, Vuzix is a public company (NASDAQ: VUZI) with offices in Rochester, NY, Oxford, UK and Tokyo, Japan.

We are on the verge of a paradigm shift from boxes on our desks and rectangles in our pockets to having a strip of glass over our eyes that projects a contextually relevant digitally layer on top of our whole world. At Meta, we are on a mission to rethink and dramatically change the way we interact with the digital world, our environments, and most importantly each other.

Join our selected startups for 5 minute pitches followed with Q&A.

Startups Included:

-Lynda Joy Gerry with KhoraVR

-Eva Jensterle and Franc Božič with Orbirama

-Dana-Maria Faneker with VR Captain

-Florian Hübner with VR Creator

-Michael Ronen with Splash

Eye Tracking is an important component which can help Augmented Reality to take off. SMI will present how Eye Tracking can be used to automatically personalise the 3D experience and how the point of gaze revolutionises interaction in AR. The power of Eye Tracking is not limited to interaction alone, in the long run Eye Tracking can make logins obsolete as well as supporting workers in visual intense tasks. SMI will outline how this can be done and present both the state-of-the-art and a leap into the future of Eye Tracking in AR.

ISMAR is the premier research conference for Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality, supported by the IEEE Computer Society. This year, the conference was held in Merida, Mexico, and next year, it will be held in Europe. This session will summarize the current hot research topics and latest results. The topics demonstrate the breadth of the field, ranging from displays (photometric calibration and compensation, scanning laser projectors) and tracking (high frame rates from camera arrays) to visualization (automotive diminished reality, motion retargeting) and interaction (remote collaboration).http://ismar.vgtc.org.

In his essay “The Ultimate Display” from 1965, Ivan E. Sutherland states that “The ultimate display would [...] be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter [...]“. This general notion of a computer-mediated or virtual reality, in which synthetic objects or the entire virtual environment get indistinguishable from the real world, dates back to Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and has been reconsidered again and again in science fiction literature as well as the movie industry. VR is often used to question whether we truly “know” if our perceptions are real or not. Movies like “The Matrix” or the fictional holodeck from the Star Trek universe are prominent examples of these kind of perceptual ambiguities. Furthermore, in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” or Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man 2″ actors can seamlessly use free-hand gestures in space combined with speech to manipulate 3D holographic projections, while they also perceive haptic feedback when touching the virtual objects. In my talk I will revisit some of the most visually impressive 3D user interfaces and experiences of such fictional ultimate displays. As a matter of fact, we cannot let a computer fully control the existence of matter, but we can fool our senses and give a user the illusion that the computer can after all. I will show how different ultimate displays can be implemented with current state-of-the-art technology by exploiting perceptually-inspired interfaces. However, we will see that the resulting ultimate displays are not so ultimate at all, but pose novel interesting future research challenges and questions.

To create an immersive experience both, AR and VR, require a natural and easy way of control and interaction. Todays devices are either fairly passiv (like the Cardboard or Glyph) or require an additional controler hardware (like the HTC Vive). Even if these controllers work really well, they remain bulky, require abstract interaction and power. --- The easier solution to AR and VR control would be using our hands: always available and always on. Plus, to create a truely immersive experience we need to see our hands and fingers in the virtual scene. Moritz is going to elaborate on the opportunities to create the most natural user interaction in AR and VR.

Maintaining presence is a key for any VR application, be it a game or a business app. In this session, you will learn how to test for latency, what are the relevant components of performance and how to measure and optimize each of those.

Being able to see and use your hands are crucial for interactive virtual reality experiences. While there are several input controllers coming to the market there are still fundamental problems related to using your hands in VR. Regardless of what controllers are being used it is difficult to make hand interaction look natural and realistic, which causes problems for experiences where the feeling of presence is key. Gleechi has been working with artificial hand movement and interaction for 8 years within robotics research and will share their knowledge about how to enable free and natural hands in VR. Attendees will leave with real tips and tricks on how to work with hands in virtual reality. They will have concrete examples of what works and what doesn't, as well as the reasons why.

Devices like HoloLens and Tango provide powerful spatial awareness capabilities that go beyond simple AR to enable truly Mixed Reality applications. Leveraging these capabilities requires an understanding of these technologies as well as new ways of thinking about user interface design and gameplay. Aaron shares his team's experiences developing apps for spatially aware devices, including Behemoth which won Best Spatial Mapping at the SFVR HoloLens hackathon and Ghostly Mansion which won Best Entertainment/Game app in Google's Project Tango development contest. He will discuss how these devices differ, how he approaches design to leverage their unique features, and lessons learned along the way.

Virtual Reality is changing the way people interact with the world in their personal and work life. Especially for old industries as fundamental construction, there are many interesting ways to use VR to create more effective workflows. One huge improvement of the workflow on construction sites will be something HoloBuilder calls "Digital Job Walks". On HoloBuilder.com, people can easily upload and link sphere images (that now can be taken easily with 360° cameras like the Theta S) to Virtual Tours. Construction Professionals, they can add Text as well as 2D & 3D objects to the sphere images to visualize ideas and make annotations. The online service allows to created Digital Job Walks quick and easy which save time and money for builders throughout the entire construction process. Advantages can be found at all stages of a construction project. During the bidding process, subcontractors can make more realistic and accurate bids because they can visit the planned construction site virtually before making a bid. During the construction project, professionals don’t have to travel back and forth between construction site but can visit all sites remotely instead. The virtual visits do not only save travel costs, more frequent updates over the cloud will also make the identification and reaction time to mistakes much faster, which notably reduces rework costs. While these are just the main advantages, there are many more which will lead to the use of VR and AR in construction. While the idea has been around for a while, HoloBuilder's easy and simple creation process of Digital Job Walks is transforming the industry.

Moderator: Christian Villwock (SMI)
Panelists:
Fabian Quosdorf (Wonderlamp)
Ronald Liebermann (Shoutr Labs)
Nico Nonne (Trotzkind)
Michael Geidel (MiriquidiFilm)
Monika Bielskyte (AFE)

Discussion on RA offline streaming with shoutr.Boxx, Things we learned about Story telling in VR, bringing real 3D people to VR, and WebAR vs AppAR

Intro to the ViewAR System, the first Template System in order to publish AR/VR applications by only applying web-development skills.

Using Virtual Worlds to solve pervasive problems in the real world involves taking deep dives into the communities of need. This is where the resources are slime, but the consequences can be high.. But hype transforms into hope when you can change a life with the power of virtuality within hospitals, clinics, schools, museums, city hall and even in deep space exploration. However, no problem in the real world has been solved by just one discipline, one sector or one killer app. The use of Real World Laboratories have been modeled across the globe to conduct critical collaborations between diverse disciplines to focus on tough problems of the world. The discovery process breaks through by making creative leaps into the face of tradition

Much of the magic from our childhood novels has become technically feasible, but we can also use these same super powers to put a bit of magic into industrial workplaces, enhancing human performance through live guidance. Dr. Wild's talk picks three magic examples (shape shifting, levitation, apparition) and shows how the technology and working principles can be applied for good in manufacturing work places.

Why you should run your own native vision algorithms inside of unity. We will show a few of the techniques, we are using in-house to accelerate our development. From CGI test data to high quality prototypes without 3d modeling experience. And of course: building and shipping real apps.

As veteran foot soldiers in the front lines of the AR developments Platipus would like to give you a glimpse of the pitfalls, challenges and opportunities we see and experience on a day-today basis developing commercial AR projects.

The presentation will be a range of wide area AR applications for different use cases, in cities (real estate, city planning, city info) as well as industries (construction, renovation, facility maintenance). As special topic, I’ll discuss how augmented Social Media can be taken further to industrial applications, for capturing tacit knowledge among maintenance workers. Technical topics include 3D tracking in wide area applications, enabling facility asset management and interaction with BIM and further links to enterprise systems.

VR First is an initiative designed to provide state-of-the-art facilities to anyone interested in exploring the power and potential of virtual reality development. The program encourages educational institutions around the world to establish dedicated VR labs on their campuses by partnering with leading VR industry stakeholders. The overarching goal of VR First is to nurture new talent in grass-roots VR development and create a global community equipped to embrace this exciting field of technology. Launched in January 2016, VR First has achieved significant outreach in the industry. 509 universities worldwide have applied to join the program, showing the great need of academic institutions for expertise, hardware and software to prepare developers for the VR industry and empower them to realize their own projects.

Augmented and virtual reality hold out the promise of opening up entirely new ways of encountering the world around us, as well as each other. However, they may also allow us to tailor and personalise our perception of reality to an extent that has never been possible before. While this prospect is genuinely alluring, it also points towards a world where individuals experience little outside their own 'youniverse'. Drawing on some promising examples, the talk will discuss how might use these emerging tools to truly expand the scope and horizons of human experience.