Facebook -- Enterprise AR

I'm pretty sure all of the AR systems (careful word choice --'system') created will be display agnostic. Different companies will build various systems of software, sensors, content, and input. They will then use the best of whatever accessories will be available in the market.

The leaders now are each going to try to become the standard, to become at the start the most accepted version will be huge. Some other player may well appear and work to compete with Microsoft on price -- or on content. As we have seen many times in the past, those players who have chosen the right content concentration may beat a superior technology.

There will be room for multiple players in the field -- some may produce entertainment over education, or consumer over enterprise.... eventually I suspect it will be like Apple vs Android or Mac vs PC. A couple of strong contenders -- but there are a lot of them now.


The payoff for whichever company dominates in this field is going to be HUGE. It will be bigger than dominating the personal computing surge in the 1980's.

Selling the best near eye display (and having the best sensors) will be like selling shovels to gold miners.


Facebook is in the race for "enterprise AR" and they have a significant presence in Redmond. Their existence in Redmond Washington is an "open secret."

They don't advertise their presence at all. A couple of years ago I was given a heads-up about their facility there and I stopped at it. Not only were the buildings unmarked -- just normal looking office buildings.... but there was no indication on any person or any vehicle what was there. (No Facebook Stickers, Logos, Shirts, no labeled visitor spot.. nothing of the kind.)

I took a couple of pictures.

A couple of hours later, my phone asked me if I wanted to label the pictures I took at Oculus.

Facebook is growing at a rapidly in Redmond.


Mashable

Facebook wants to sell more virtual reality headsets to businesses.

The company is working on an "enterprise edition" of its Oculus Go and Oculus Quest headsets, according to a new job posting that was first discovered by Variety.

The job listing is for a software engineer position on Oculus' AR/VR Enterprise team. Though light on specifics, it says enterprise editions of its headsets will launch in 2019.

"Starting with VR, we are building an Oculus Go and Oculus Quest Enterprise edition expected to launch in 2019," the description says.

Facebook has previously dabbled in this space. The company has offered Oculus Business, Rift bundles meant to appeal to businesses, since 2017. But a dedicated enterprise version of its hardware would be a significant expansion for Oculus. The job description suggests Facebook is working on partnerships with "enterprise-developer ecosystems" and other software platforms in order to create business-specific features.

Manager's guided to Augmented Reality

Probably a good thing to be the company providing the best displays for this technology.

Harvard Business Review (more at the source)




Augmented reality, a set of technologies that superimposes digital data and images on the physical world, promises to close this gap and release untapped and uniquely human capabilities. Though still in its infancy, AR is poised to enter the mainstream; according to one estimate, spending on AR technology will hit $60 billion in 2020. AR will affect companies in every industry and many other types of organizations, from universities to social enterprises. In the coming months and years, it will transform how we learn, make decisions, and interact with the physical world. It will also change how enterprises serve customers, train employees, design and create products, and manage their value chains, and, ultimately, how they compete.

****More broadly, AR enables a new information-delivery paradigm, which we believe will have a profound impact on how data is structured, managed, and delivered on the internet. Though the web transformed how information is collected, transmitted, and accessed, its model for data storage and delivery—pages on flat screens—has major limits: It requires people to mentally translate 2-D information for use in a 3-D world. That isn’t always easy, as anyone who has used a manual to fix an office copier knows. By superimposing digital information directly on real objects or environments, AR allows people to process the physical and digital simultaneously, eliminating the need to mentally bridge the two. That improves our ability to rapidly and accurately absorb information, make decisions, and execute required tasks quickly and efficiently.