Understanding AR with Vuforia

My previous research led me to finding a plugin that is used within Unity to create AR apps. The plugin responsible for this is Vuforia. Vuforia a software development kit for creating AR related apps for mobile devices. It's able to map certain points of an object that is identified as an unique pattern to assign an Augmented object to it. A popular example that uses the AR and rose it's popularity worldwide in a short period of time is PokemonGo.

    (The Washington Post,2013)   

What is AR? and what does it mean for us? (as explained by IDC)

Augmented reality (AR) technology is here now, and companies of all shapes and sizes are utilizing it to change the way work gets done and to drive better outcomes for themselves and their clients. IDC believes that service-based organizations should be among the first to embrace this new technology or they could face near-term disruption of their business. Beyond the service elements within a wide range of enterprises, we also see strong interest in AR inside of companies that have specific needs around knowledge transfer and training, sales and marketing, and manufacturing. When you sum these major groups together, the result is that a huge number of companies are already using AR. 

According to IDC's Worldwide Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide, in 2017, companies spent more than $3.6 billion worldwide on AR hardware, software, and services, and that number is set to grow to more than $8 billion in 2018. IDC recently completed a custom project for PTC in the United States where we surveyed a mix of IT decision makers, enterprise executives, and line-of-business managers and found that 77% of companies were already experimenting with AR. While most companies were still in the early stages of testing, a surprisingly large number of them were already moving from proof of concept into pilots, from pilots into the early stage of deployment, or from early stage deployments into late-stage deployments. Another 6% said they expected to begin testing AR in the next 6–12 months. Less than one-fifth of respondents said their company had no immediate plans around AR. This is not the company you want your organization to keep. 

AR technology is exciting because it brings real-world benefits to organizations left out of the digital transformation wave. Why? Because in many cases, the job to be done, the process to be revised, or the knowledge to be transferred requires at least one foot in the physical world and one foot in the digital world. AR helps bridge this gap by bringing digital assets into the real world — content viewable on mobile devices such as smartphones as well as using headsets that let workers engage with the content hands free. The result is that in the space of a few years, companies stuck with using paperbased processes, that are dealing with aging expert populations, or that have been looking for ways to iterate more rapidly in manufacturing have found the tools they need to move into the 21st century. 

Today is an exciting time for such firms, but it also means companies in these industries that are slow to adopt these new technologies, that take a "wait and see" approach, may find themselves quickly falling behind. This IDC white paper will dive deep into some of the primary use cases of AR related to service-based industries, knowledge transfer and training, sales and marketing, and manufacturing. It also includes insights from individuals at companies who have already started their AR journey.  

References:-

The Washington Post. (2013). A group of people play the new game in union square in new york[Photo]. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/07/12/what-is-really-behind-the-pokemon-go-craze/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f8aefd09059d

Tom Mainelli. (2018). How augmented reality drives real world gains in services, training, sales and marketing, and manufacturing (US43844418). Retrieved from www.ptc.com/en/resources/ar/report/how-augmented-reality-drives-real-world-gains