Mixed Reality for Logistics and Transportation

Shel Israel will be one of our featured speaker at PARC Forum Thurs,  April 27th at 5pm in Palo Alto at PARC’s Pake Auditorium.  This is free for the public and you can register here.

I spend lots of time on the leading edge of Mixed Reality technology. It is the part of it that gets the most media attention and the part where so many brands will need to adapt in less time than they may realize.

But enterprise applications that improve logistics, employee training, complex or urgent repairs are resulting in lots of sales for companies like Daqri, ODG and Hololens, where prices that make consumers cringe are considered reasonable incremental expenses. This sort of activity may not be as sexy as zapping aliens or swimming with dolphins, but it can have significant impact on the bottom line and customer relationships.

A good way to follow this, is to pay attention to mentions in traditional trade publications such as this. It is often where you can get the clearest, simplest and generally highly accurate explanations, without all the geek talk that you might find elsewhere.

When we work with clients, we pay attention to how the new technologies can help in areas that the public may never see, even though that same public may be safer, because  headsets were used to properly wire and airplane wing, or train oil rig workers on how to prevent or extinguish a fire.

There is also the very significant cost factor. Transportation and logistics are expensive–usually between five and ten percent of total budget. If you are a Global 1000 companies, this amounts to many millions of dollars. AR and VR can lower costs of order fulfillment, truck loading, schedules and stocking as this excellent PWC Report explains.

Along with warehouses and training centers, AR portends to play a large role in transportation, where AR headsets will be able to safely give drivers more road information. In time,they will also be able to observe signs of fatigue and advise drivers that it is time to take a break. The headsets will allow loading and unloading with greater precision and most important at all, they will alert drivers of dangerous activities in blind spots.