Who Should Lead Your Digital Transformation?

Posted on December 10, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises?

For simplicity I’ll limit the possible solutions to who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises to either the CIO or someone else. The two most important factors in making the right selection are your current state of technology adoption and your culture. Are you moving materials manually or is your operation automated? Are all parts of your organization connected (IoT ) from sales to manufacturing? Are you already using AI? Are you still managing large waterfall style projects mapped start to finish with Gantt charts? Do you evaluate and deploy technology initiatives differently than other business initiatives? The answers to these questions can indicate where you are in your digital transformation process and the leadership required to move your organization forward.

Here are the two examples of situations where the CIO may be just the leader you need:

Situation 1 — Your enterprise is behind on technology adoption and you don’t even have a CIO. IT rolls-up to finance, HR, or other functional or operational leader. In this case, the CEO can set the tone for transformation by creating the role of CIO. She can define the CIO as the change agent and transform the culture around this role and the journey to an agile future state of the business.

Situation 2 — Your enterprise is technology-forward. Your data is already in the cloud and employees consume it real-time on mobile, desktop and operational devices alike. You include IT initiatives in core business decisions like other capital investments. In this case, your digital transformation culture is established and your focus is on implementing the latest emerging technologies.

Here is a situation where the CIO may not be the right leader:

Your company has intermittently adopted technology to supplement your ERP on an ad hoc basis, but the architecture was created before cloud and mobile fundamentals were even contemplated. Changing one application within your system risks breaking another, but you can’t predict which one. Culturally, your technology exploration and implementation cycles are bogged-down in IT backlog and your leaders see IT as a cost center. In this situation, the CEO will enable success by assigning a leader from outside the technology realm — a ‘digital transformation officer’ or project leader — to build and lead a cultural case for change from the ground up. Then the CIO can help deliver technology into the new culture.

Don’t blame the CIO too quickly for the current state of your enterprise. The explosion of technology and the economy in the early 2000’s collided to create expanding IT teams deploying new ERPs and adopting new technologies. Then the recession of the late 2000’s undermined the business assumptions upon which these investments were based. In my industry, building products, the result was devastating. No matter how good an IT team or leader may have been, IT was a less-understood cost-center. Considering that ten years ago any 40+ year-old CEO or senior executive had formed their business paradigm in a pre-mobile, pre-email and pre-PC world, any failed IT investments due to economic collapse were likely admonished more than non-IT investments that failed for the same underlying reason.

To establish a new digital path for your enterprise, a collaborative leader who has delivered results across multiple functions can deliver digital transformation. IT teams and consultants can help guide the technology deployment. After all, digital transformation is a culture change initiative to leverage technology, not a technology initiative to change culture. A successful digital transformation leader endorsed by the CEO and respected by peers builds a successful case for change from the ground up. The technologies he chooses to implement become decisions just like other investment decisions in equipment or teams and are weighed at the same time, by the same leaders, on the same basis of relative return on investment.

JumpStart Your Digital Transformation

Innovating technology is crucial, or your business will be left behind. Our expertise in technology and business helps our clients deliver tangible outcomes and accelerate growth. At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Kopius has an expert emerging tech team. We bring this expertise to your JumpStart program and help uncover innovative ideas and technologies supporting your business goals. We bring fresh perspectives while focusing on your current operations to ensure the greatest success.

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Valence Takes Part in Seattle Interactive Conference 2018

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Valence Takes Part in Seattle Interactive Conference

#SIC2018 Exhibitor’s Hall

Visionary thinkers seeking disruptive technologies and innovative business models were brought together at the Seattle Interactive Conference(SIC) hosted in downtown Seattle on October 17th and 18th. During the course of two days, thousands of entrepreneurs, online business professionals, executives, and students attended SIC to share inspiration and learn about what is happening at the intersection of technology, creativity, and commerce. Valence was excited to participate in this annual event, and we had many great conversations with people across sectors wanting to learn more about the emerging technologies — and that’s what we do at Valence!

In Valence’s booth, we shared our visions and exhibited how we continuously innovate and help enterprise drive digital transformation through applying modern technologies including AR/VR, artificial intelligence, IoT, voice and chat, blockchain and more.

Valence was especially proud to showcase the fully immersive Space Needle Virtual Reality Tour that many SIC attendees raved about! Valence built this VR tour as part of Seattle’s Space Needle renovation marketing campaign rolled out in spring this year, which allowed local and national journalists to virtually see and feel what visitors would experience when the huge makeover to the Space Needle completed later in summer.

Putting on a VR headset (Samsung Odyessy: Windows Mixed Reality) and stepping onto a custom built haptic stage, within a minute the user would experience the elevator ride up to Space Needle’s observation deck and be looking down at the 500 feet between them and the ground, through a rotating glass floor.

During this virtual tour, those who have a fear of heights were often hesitant to put their foot forward onto the “glass floor” initially, as it felt too real to them, but in the end, they were very amazed by the experience of walking on a rotating glass floor and sitting back on a glass bench floating over the Seattle skyline.

We also brought in a pair of Magic Leap mixed reality glasses to demonstrate how users can interact with not only the 3D digital objects created in a virtual environment mapped to the current room they are in, but also the room and the physical objects inside it. For example, they can add a virtual animal on the coffee table that’s physically in the room; they can walk around and see the animal at different angles. The exhibition area immediately becomes the user’s playground once they put these glasses on, and people are excited about where the mixed reality technology will take them beyond gaming.

Among the visionaries at the conference was Valence’s very own Hannah Mintek, Head of Design, who was on a panel of XR (Mixed Reality) insiders, along with Vinay Narayan from HTC Vive, Andrew Mitrak from HaptX, and Theresa Moore from Pixability to share their insight about how we can make sure the future of XR tech is based on reality.

We had an epic time learning and networking at Seattle Interactive Conference and hope to see you next year!

Voice and Chat: Cornerstones of Digital Transformation

Posted on October 3, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

We are excited to announce today the release of two new innovation programs related to voice and chat technologies! The two releases include the Healthcare Experience Innovation Accelerator as well as an internal, employee-focused “voice bot” framework based on Amazon Alexa for Business technologies.

Our Healthcare Experience Innovation Accelerator is focused on accelerating customer projects related to understanding and applying voice-related technologies, such as Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa, in real-life healthcare situations. We have been exploring all the different natural language processing services that both Microsoft and Amazon are releasing at an increasingly rapid pace and wanted to apply them in a real-life scenario — one that we thought could stand a bit of fixing: healthcare information discovery, appointment scheduling, and patient processing. Don’t get us wrong — we know healthcare is complicated — but we are hoping our efforts perhaps spark some imaginations around the industry on what is possible.

Our framework builds on existing voice and chat technologies and adds some healthcare specific natural language experiences. This is the third Innovation Accelerator we have built, coming after the release of the HoloLens Innovation Accelerator this past May and the Blockchain Innovation Accelerator released this past July. Our Innovation Team is thinking daily about how to apply our pillars of digital transformation in new and exciting ways to help customers “jumpstart” real-life solutions.

Today we also released our employee-focused voice skill called “Valence Bot”. When you start at Kopius, you are given an Echo Dot as one part of your onboarding hardware package — right alongside your computer. We use the Amazon Alexa for Business platform and have built a private enterprise skill to provide access via voice commands to all the corporate information an employee needs to get their job done, including human resources information (benefits, employee count, and more) as well as access to corporate systems like IT requests, CRM data, and more. If you want to see more, you can find details in the video we made for the Amazon Alexa for Business “This is My Skill” showcase.

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Transforming the Employee Experience with Alexa for Business

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

At Kopius*, we help enterprise customers worldwide understand and apply next-generation technologies in smart and innovative ways to advance their business goals. These goals often include improving the employee experience.

Across modern technologies such as voice and chat, artificial intelligence, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain and more, Kopius has a wide range of innovation and consulting capabilities that deliver forward-thinking, quick-to-market and cost-effective solutions to our customers.

One of the mantras we follow is “learn by doing.” We believe that by providing our own employees with instantiations of the same solutions we build for our customers, employees will not only understand our business better, but will be more interested and involved in what we do.

This is why we built the “Valence Bot” for our employees — to provide them with a tool that not only helps them with their daily jobs, but also helps them understand modern voice and chat platforms — one of our key technology pillars.

What is Valence Bot?

Valence Bot is a chatbot that uses Amazon Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, to answer employee questions and handle requests related to the company. Employees can obtain company information and make requests simply by interacting with Alexa from any personal Alexa device. This includes things like:

· Obtaining employee benefits information such as healthcare provider information, group policy numbers, and paid time off (PTO) information.

· Requesting IT support or submitting facility requests.

· Accessing personalized information based on job role, such as company sales data for the Executive team, or new hire data for the Recruiting team.

How Does it Work?

Valence Bot is built on top of the core framework outlined in the Question and Answer Bot blog entry originally posted a year ago in the AWS Machine Learning Blog. After adding additional functionality and integration points to this framework, the solution is bundled into an Alexa private skill and deployed to employees using Alexa for Business. Every new Kopius employee is given an Amazon Echo device during onboarding. They are also enrolled into our Alexa for Business organization, allowing them access to the private Valence Bot skill from anywhere.

The high-level architecture of Valence Bot is shown in the following diagram:

Details of each component are as follows:

Alexa Device — A personal Alexa device that employees use to interact with Valence Bot. Kopius gives all employees an Echo Dot, but they can access Valence Bot through any existing Alexa device they may already own. Access through the Alexa mobile app is also possible.
Valence Bot — This is the private Alexa skill that gets deployed to each employee that serves as the user-facing interface to information and requests.
Alexa for Business — The management layer that is used to deploy the private skill to all employees.
Chat Engine — Built on Amazon Lex, the chat engine is ultimately what gets exported to the private Alexa skill. Lex is configured with just one slot and intent to capture the text of the question for further processing.
API Services — A web interface (protected by Cognito authentication) accessing an Amazon API Gateway instance provides administrative access to manage content served by Valence Bot.
Content Datastore — An Amazon Elasticsearch instance provides the mechanism to search the question and answer data for the best responses. In addition to simply returning an answer, a “hook” can be assigned to questions which enables custom Lambda functions to be triggered for the purpose of obtaining additional information or handling requests.
Fulfillment — AWS Lambda functions are used to serve two purposes in this architecture:
- Interface from which Valence Bot interacts directly to provide answers to questions and fulfill requests. In this scenario, a Lambda function queries Elasticsearch and returns the best answer.
- Seeks out additional information beyond simple question and answer data in Elasticsearch. In this scenario, a hook defined in Elasticsearch triggers additional Lambda functions that then fetch additional information or handle requests. Example include integration with 3rd party APIs to obtain sales data or submit service requests.
Notifications — Amazon notification services such as Amazon SES and SNS notify the user when appropriate, such as when their service request has been submitted, including information around expected SLAs.

What Do Our Employees Think?

Teah Delfino, our Director of Recruiting, explains the benefits of Valence Bot from her perspective:

“When I brought it home and set it up, I thought I wouldn’t use it much — I’m in HR so I have access to a lot of company information. But I find I use Valence Bot all the time — it’s so convenient to simply say, “Alexa, ask Valence Bot when our health insurance renews,” or “Alexa, ask Valence Bot who we’ve hired in the past month.” It’s also a compelling story to tell when I’m speaking with potential employees. I get a lot of positive feedback about what a unique benefit it is and how excited they are that we live in the world we work.”

Interested in Learning More?

Interested in learning more about Valence Bot or how voice and chat technology could improve your employee’s experiences? Contact us and we’ll start you off with a demo, to show how remarkable this technology can be!

*Kopius performed this work under its previously known business name, Valence.

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Humanizing the Un-Human: The Current State of Robotics

Posted on September 10, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

I know what you’re thinking (insert 80’s pop culture movie with robots), I thought the same thing when I saw my company was digging its heels into robotics. But wouldn’t that take jobs away? Is there even demand for robots? What about robot attacks?

Well shame on me, I was completely wrong, across the board. Let’s talk about the state of robotics.

I recently drove roundtrip from New York City to Toronto, by way of Montreal and a little city in New Hampshire called Merrimack where I visited Waypoint Robotics, a company Valence is partnering with to bring digital innovation, and in this case, robotics innovation, to enterprise companies all over the world.

Upon entering Waypoint, you can tell these guys are serious about what they are working on and super (rightly) proud of it. After seeing Waypoint’s Vector, moving swiftly about the shop, I was pleased to spend time with Waypoint’s founder and CEO, Jason Walker, who let me take over the helm of the Vector.

Waypoint is something of an anomaly — they are a robotics company that is not even two years old, and they have already shipped dozens of robots. As everyone knows, hardware is hard, and getting a hardware product on the market within two years is pretty amazing; but with robotics, four years to market is more typical if it’s an exceptional team.

What really sets Waypoint apart is how easy the Vector is to use. That didn’t happen by accident and it’s more than just a product requirement — it’s Waypoint’s design philosophy. But the next layer of the onion, the “why” is what’s most interesting. Waypoint started with the workforce, and made their needs, their experience, the guiding light for designing the products; not just in terms of workflow and user experience, but from a cultural and sociological standpoint. Waypoint believes that the workforce is essential to the economy on the supply and demand side, but more importantly, the workforce is the fabric of our society. Waypoint recognizes, emphasizes, and utilizes that tremendous value.

Waypoints customers aren’t looking to eliminate their workforce; on the contrary, they typically have had a “for hire” sign in the window for years. But until Waypoint’s Vector came along, the only way to get a robot working was to hire a roboticist to go with it, and that’s just one more, even harder-to-hire person. Waypoint’s idea was to make a robot that is so easy to setup and use that the workforce that is on the job right now, can immediately take Vector and put it to work for them. There’s nobody better to setup a robot to help with moving materials than the person who’s been moving those same materials in that same factory for the last 15 years.

Over and over we see customers who have their most valuable people, their most skilled and rare tradespeople pushing carts for hours and hours each week. These workers know the value of their time and their talent, and they know what a waste it is to be pushing carts when they could be setting up CNC machines or rebuilding transmissions. It is frustrating to do work that underutilized your talents, and it’s ten times as frustrating when that work is physically exhausting or ergonomically stressful.

To sum it all up, the idea is to make a product that the workforce can take control of and use directly. The state of robotics is that we should empower the workforce with a new industry 4.0 tool. In doing so, we invest in our people as valuable teammates and add to their skill set. Simultaneously they are able to offload the most physically demanding, and essential but low-value tasks to the robot. And that in turn gives the workforce more genuinely productive and rewarding hours in the day. The state of robots is more productivity, less physical exhaustion, and a longer career all translate to a higher quality of life — and that’s the core of the onion; that’s the why.

At Valence, we take the latest technologies and apply them to the challenges faced by enterprise customers every day. Interested in hearing more? Contact us and we’ll start you off with a demo, to show how remarkable this technology can be!

Announcing the Blockchain Innovation Accelerator

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

We were excited to announce yesterday the release of two new innovation programs related to blockchain technologies. The two releases include the Blockchain Innovation Accelerator as well as an internal, employee-focused crypto marketplace built on blockchain technologies.

The Blockchain Innovation Accelerator is focused on accelerating customer projects related to understanding and applying blockchain technologies in market today. Focused on a loyalty points scenario in which a sample airline utilizes blockchain to allow customers and vendors to redeem and exchange airline frequent flyer miles (or “tokens”) using smart contract technology, the accelerator offers reference architecture and sample code to create a more approachable scenario as well as accelerate development efforts. The Blockchain Innovation Accelerator is built on Microsoft Azure using the Ethereum blockchain and implements the ERC20 Token Interface with custom smart contract modifications to restrict the flow of tokens between and among whitelisted participants. This is the second Innovation Accelerator released by Valence, coming after the most recent release of the HoloLens Innovation Accelerator this past May. Built by the Valence Innovation Team, the Innovation Accelerator program strives to provide a specific — and often vertical, industry-oriented — framework to help “jumpstart” real-life solutions.

“At Valence we focus exclusively on digital transformation technologies and how they work together to deliver real business results for customers,” said Jim Darrin, Managing Director of Valence. “We believe blockchain will change the nature of distributed systems, and so we have assembled a set of software components and reference architectures to accelerate the ability to both build integrated loyalty points solutions as well as make blockchain more approachable generally for enterprise customers everywhere.”

Additionally, the company today announced the release of their internal, employee-focused crypto marketplace. Built on Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain technologies, this internal marketplace enables the issuing and redemption of Valence cryptocurrency called Valence Electrons (symbol: VLE). When joining Valence, new employees get a fixed number of VLE which they can spend on the internal Valence marketplace to purchase unique goods and services. Each step of the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and over time, VLE will have increasing value correlated with the growth of the company. Additionally, the company expects to enable employees to post their own offerings and create a barter environment to increase the number of unique goods and services available.

“I am incredibly excited to release this internal marketplace based on the core concepts of blockchain,” said Matthew Carlisle, Technology Director at Valence. “We strive to make all our digital transformation technologies approachable to employees, and we believe this idea of creating our own internal token system for redemption of goods and services will be a great way for employees to experience blockchain and token technologies firsthand. And we’re thrilled to be able to share our experience with the rest of the world as well.”

Additional Resources:

Marketplaces, Blockchains, Smart Contracts, Oh My!

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

In this post, we talk about how to use blockchain technology to improve the employee experience with a cryptocurrency marketplace.

At several previous companies I’ve been given jackets, t-shirts, mugs and other nice employee perks — the simple stuff. While these have always been well-meaning by company leadership, it’s usually been the case that these perks were not entirely to my own personal taste. After all, it is pretty hard to imagine a scenario where you are able to accommodate the tastes and interests of all employees. But what if there was a way to customize employee merchandise to what each employee really wants?

At Kopius we like to use the digital transformation technologies we evangelize to our customers to advance our own business. You certainly have heard this before — the old “eating your own dog food” program. But for us we not only learn how these technologies work but also helps us (1) create a learning environment for all our employees and (2) have real-life experience we can share with our customers. To that end — and to tackle the issue of employee preference — we developed our own merchandise cryptocurrency marketplace using Hyperledger Sawtooth, one of the most popular blockchain technologies available today.

The user experience is simple: when joining Kopius our employees get a fixed number of Valence Level Electrons (symbol: VLE), and we have an internal cryptocurrency marketplace website where employees can spend the VLE for various Valence-branded items you might not normally find: wireless headphones, beer growlers, and more. More VLE is given to employees over time as and when performance and situations allow.

If you’re saying to yourself right now, “um, folks… in 2017 we just called this a ‘website’”, then I’d say you are both right and wrong. Right in that — yes, it’s a website! But wrong in that the sense that the underpinnings of our marketplace use blockchain technologies. And this underpinning allows us to think about a few new things that would not be easily possible with just a “website”: (1) a level of integrity and transaction auditing, and more importantly (2) the ability to easily open this up more broadly to other vendors. After all, why couldn’t other companies in the local area start accepting VLE as a currency for the exchange of goods and services? It is both possible and totally reasonable.

For larger companies this starts to make a lot of sense. It allows them to give employees more choice and, in theory, spend less on perks as there would be less waste. Plus, it allows employees more choice because blockchain technologies allow for very simple integration, so they can accept VLE instead of the good old U.S. dollar (USD). In order to enable this, we would need to create a reimbursement flow as well assign a starting VLE to USD exchange rate. But note that this can all be done in a trustless environment. In other words, in order to add a vendor that accepts VLE, we don’t need to trust that company and they don’t need to trust us. Smart contracts running on the blockchain enforce the rules that govern our business relationship. Each party can do what they want as long as they follow the rules.

There are many companies out there that issue loyalty points, with airlines certainly one of the largest. As their users start to accumulate large amounts of points this creates several problems: first, customers accumulate too many points and thus may switch airlines, and second — and in many cases a bigger issue — it creates an outstanding financial liability for the company. As a reaction, airlines try to create innovative ways to solve these problems. In fact, recently I saw a glass of fancy champagne available to buy with my Delta Airline SkyMiles. And yes, I can already exchange my SkyMiles for a few other things but honestly the selection is really limited — and there is a reason for that: you can only imagine the IT integration headaches to onboard a vendor into the Delta Airline IT systems so that they could access the user’s SkyMiles balance in order to redeem points for goods or services.

Realizing this scenario is one that many customers might struggle with, we built and released today our Blockchain Innovation Accelerator focused on loyalty points systems. Built on Microsoft Azure and Ethereum, this Innovation Accelerator provides a reference architecture and sample code to make these technologies more approachable. In general, moving loyalty points — or scenarios similar to this — to blockchain technologies offers the potential to create a much larger market for those points by solving issues associated with the current system.

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Using Data to Improve Patient Outcomes

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

We help organizations implement a unified data governance solution that helps them manage and govern their on-premises, multi-cloud, and SaaS data. The data governance solution will always include a data retention policy.

Can predictive analytics in healthcare change patient outcomes?

It’s no secret that technology is making its mark in the healthcare industry. From surgery rooms to at-home care, technology is being applied in ways that only push healthcare forward. Within the past year, companies such as Google and Microsoft have begun stepping into the healthcare field. And it doesn’t stop there, hospitals such as Johns Hopkins have also joined the movement. But why now?

At Kopius we’ve seen first-hand what technology can bring to the table for a patient’s care. Whether it’s pain management through Virtual Reality, training for medical professionals, or quicker EMR workflows, technology has solved many pain points for the healthcare industry and there are no signs of slowing down. Over the years, healthcare has shifted to a more predictive approach. With this perspective, doctors can focus on preventive measures with a goal of fewer hospital trips and better long-term care for the patient. This new approach has only been made possible by the large amount of data available at our fingertips and the birth of predictive analytics.

Let’s talk about predictive analytics in healthcare.

Predictive analytics in healthcare uses data to help predicate outcomes. Whether it’s for healthcare or environmental purposes there is one common goal: to prevent negative outcomes. This approach is extremely powerful, but there is an existing technology that can take it further, Artificial Intelligence. By merging the two we can truly harness the power of data to improve people’s health.

Today, artificial intelligence is being used to help doctors diagnose patients. Drawing from a patient’s family history or medical images, AI can be applied in different scenarios. For example, an artificial intelligence diagnostic device is helping doctor’s diagnosis patients with a specific eye disease. Just by uploading a high-resolution picture, this device can take the image and interpret results on its own. While artificial intelligence can assist with individual patients, the biggest advantage is its ability to operate with machine learning in which it can analyze a large amount of data, learn, and adapt. It can take data from thousands of patients, analyze their medical history, and make predictions on a much larger scale.

The integration of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics is transforming patient care on a small and large scale. It’s making value-based care attainable while keeping the patient at the heart of it all. At Kopius we understand the technology of Machine Learning and the potential it will bring to your organization. Whether you are involved in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, or more, Artificial Intelligence can be applied to many industries.

Contact Kopius to JumpStart Your Success Today

Kopius supports businesses seeking to govern and utilize AI and ML to build for the future. We’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders, equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Plan & define data strategy, quality, and governance for AI and ML
Rapidly prototype data & AI solutions
And, fast-forward success

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Explore Predictive Analytics Solutions

Advancing Digital Transformation in the Manufacturing, Operations and Logistics Industry

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

At Kopius we are known for building and deploying leading-edge solution using digital transformation technologies. While many companies see the need for digital transformation, choosing where to start in any big industrial enterprise — and in particular manufacturing, operations and logistics — can be overwhelming. The gap between business systems and tools and the pilla r s of technology transforming business today may as well be the Grand Canyon. Taken together with the often monumental change management and culture gap workload, many teams find themselves far from becoming a data and technology-driven enterprise. Many know they need to execute on digital transformation — they just don’t know where to start.

How to address digital transformation in manufacturing, operations, and logistics?

We try to close these gaps by connecting business domain knowledge with our clients with technology and solution expertise. We try to know enough about an industry to help companies get started down the digital transformation path. Because getting started — simply beginning the process of “doing” and “learning” — is what matters most. Need a digital transformation team who understands global supply chain? How about distribution operations, warehousing, and transportation? What about reliability in industrial manufacturing? And why not add first-hand experience of monumental culture-change when integrating businesses, on top of the complexities of combining ERP systems? At Kopius we have more domain knowledge to combine with our expertise than ever.

JumpStart Your Success Today

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

Augmented World Expo 2018— a recap through the eyes of Valence

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Augmented World Expo 2018— a recap through the eyes of Valence

Matthew Carlisle — Director of Technology

Several of us engineers and developers from Valence spent the last few days of May at the 9th Annual Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California. Since not everyone could attend, I thought I’d share some insights and impressions, since it was a pretty amazing (um, should I say awe-inspiring?) experience!

Valence was one of the few service providers there, possibly because AR hasn’t reached mass adoption yet. There’s been a ton of interest (remember Pokémon Go?) and some cool demo projects, but it hasn’t fully caught fire. At least not for the mass consumer market. Yet. (More on that below… keep reading!)

Here’s what I DID notice at the Augmented World Expo, though. It looks like wearable AR glasses are making a come-back. For a while, there was mainly just Microsoft’s HoloLens. Of course, that was after the Google Glass experiment, which turned out not to be such a great success. Perhaps it was simply before its time, or perhaps too consumer focused given the $1,500 price tag, or perhaps not focused enough on privacy. Whatever the reason, things went south for a time.

But it definitely looks like the technology is on the rise again, this time more aligned with enterprise and industrial uses. At AWE, there must have been over 30 manufacturers of various grades of mixed reality glasses, screens, etc. Companies like ODG are innovating and creating devices kind of like chunky sunglasses with a phenomenal amount of power and a visual experience that’s top of the line.

There’s a huge variety, too, with multiple kinds of products entering the marketplace. You have full-immersion 3D AR, like HoloLens and the ODG offerings (some of ODG’s products are made for gaming and offer theater-quality visuals).

Then there are industrial or enterprise options for the factory and warehouse. One company that caught our eye was RealWear, which manufactures tough, helmet-mounted AR goggles with voice activation for workers and technicians. These are not 3D or immersive, but they are a way to add data, value, and functionality to the experience — think tutorials on how to make a repair on-site, like while you’re looking at a broken carburetor or wind turbine.

They’re all great for a hands-free, heads-up work experience, say in hazardous environments. Or for adding to 3D development projects, like in real estate or city planning. There’s a lot of interest in the health care field and other commercial uses, as well.

Costs are coming down, but the devices are still expensive. That’s why there is a lot of experimentation all around, and we have yet to see mass adoption or any wide-scale use of this technology, especially in consumer markets. That’s actually a normal pattern for technology adoption, especially when it comes to hardware.

For now, the main energy in AR for consumers seems to be coming from the mobile handset universe. It has started to become widely adopted at this point, with movie premiers using AR to engage fans and grow audiences, IKEA and Home Depot joining the fray to help consumers visualize their purchases, and cosmetics retailer Sephora enabling consumers to try virtual makeup without leaving the house.

Surprisingly, there were very few mobile AR vendors or developers at AWE. I’m not sure why that it is. Maybe because mobile AR has moved from being cool to just being something everyone can do — especially with new tools like Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. Or perhaps it’s not considered “real” AR, but simply a mobile experience.

At the Augmented World Expo, Tony Parisi, Head of AR/VR ads for Unity and an AWE speaker had a really interesting take on this duality, contrasting the high-end AR headset market for industrial use and the consumer market’s more entertainment-oriented approach to the technology.

At Kopius, we design digital experiences for our industrial and enterprise clients, so they can access the best of both worlds at once: the real world in front of them plus the virtual world of critical information, data, and context.

We were awestruck by our time at AWE, and we’re back home imagining the possibilities. Interested in hearing more? Contact us, and we’ll start you off with a demo, to show how remarkable this technology can be!