During 2016 augmented reality (AR) smart instruction and live support video calling solution specialist, Scope AR raised $2 million USD towards its plans for industrial AR applications. Today, the company has revealed the fruit of that work by announcing that its mixed reality (MR) content authoring platform, WorkLink, now supports Microsoft HoloLens.
With the combination of WorkLink and HoloLens businesses can now create interactive, holographic training content for staff. As HoloLens is hands-free users can for example repair a piece of equipment, or assemble machinery whilst visually being taught at the same time.
“Through its built-in depth camera and sophisticated tracking technology, HoloLens is one of the best wearable devices for hands-free use of the MR applications so many organizations are seeking,” said Scott Montgomerie, CEO of Scope AR in a statement. “With WorkLink now supporting the device, enterprises finally have a simple and easy way to digitize visual instructions at scale — empowering all workers to become their own expert — and begin to realize the full potential of MR.”
WorkLink has been designed so that even non-technical HoloLens users can build step-by-step content, whether its for training, repairs, manufacturing or any other applications. Speaking to VRFocus on the subject Scope AR co-founder Graham Melley said: “We’ve seen interest from many places, one of challenges is to determine how much we should maybe focus in and how much we should keep a broad application. The problems that we’ve solved thus far through lessons that we’ve learned and the feedback we’re getting from our current clients, we’re still not at the point where we’re having to be extremely customised to the cliental we’re working with. Just by giving them an open template to be able to build instructions and bring in whatever content they have, it’s really just a powerful open template anybody can use it for anything, and it’s extremely rare that we’ve shown it to someone and they don’t see an application for what they do.”
The software is also fully platform agnostic, enabling cross-platform publishing on Android, iOS and Windows simultaneously, depending on which device a business wants to use. And while HoloLens is the main focus today Acope AR has been looking at as many headsets as possible.
We’ve done some implementation with Meta, we’ve got a long history with the ODG’s, pretty much anything that’s available, we’ll even try out monocular devices, and between the two products that we have RemoteAR and WorkLink, we see different applications for hardware all over the place. So as much as we deeply love the HoloLens, we’re not about telling people what hardware they like and what hardware they need,” said Melley. “And you can safely assume we’ll be announcing more device support in the next 6 to 12 months.”
“Enterprise-class instructional content is one of the most impactful use cases across MR today. By providing a platform for anyone to customize their content easily for MR integration, Scope AR is making it easy for users to take advantage of the benefits of mixed reality using Microsoft HoloLens,” said Brandon Bray from Microsoft.
With today’s announcement current subscribers to WorkLink can update their projects to take advantage of HoloLens if they so wish as they all have access to support.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Scope AR, reporting back with its latest progress.