XR Nation Citizen's Spotlight: Augumenta
Updated: Feb 18, 2021
Citizen's Spotlight is a weekly series sharing an XR Nation citizen's story.
OULU, FINLAND (February 17, 2021) – Industrial AR is our game. Augumenta works with large manufacturing companies and industrial enterprises in maintenance and field services all over the world.
The common denominator of our customers is having the drive to continuously develop their own operations and ways of working. Staying still and laying low gets one into trouble. The pandemic is convincing even the most stubborn “we have always done things this way” organisations to rethink their strategies. Digital solutions and Augmented Reality are not for the future; they have been here for quite a while and right now are key means to business survival.
While we have gained some serious expertise along the road in technologies, devices, and projects with industrial clients and have established our position as a trusted and innovative partner in industrial AR, we originally started with another mission. The company was founded in 2012 during the time the first real smartglasses came into the market. Back then, there were these cool new devices but not that many good ways to interact with them. To solve the problem, Augumenta founders Peter, Damien, and Tero, who already had a long history in the ICT industry, did research on Augmented Reality and computer vision and decided to take the leap, pool their expertise, and start a new company in this super exciting, “new” area: Augmented Reality.
As a first product, we developed an interaction SDK, an efficient toolkit for other developers to create intuitive gesture control into their smartglasses apps. The foundation of our development was (and continues to be) intuitive use and a low learning curve.
We soon realized that more than just a great SDK was needed. There were so many
ways enterprises could benefit from AR but for many, it was simply too complicated a
technology to deploy at the time. We were listening carefully to our clients and saw an
opportunity: enabling our industrial customers to use AR to improve the efficiency of their daily operations. With our new target, we soon launched new products, such as the SmartPanel AR user interface followed by the Studio authoring tool, and a little later SmartAlert and SmartGuide apps. Our goal was to help companies, especially in the manufacturing industry to use IoT data, improve productivity, safety, and quality, and, ultimately, their bottom line.
The next step with this portfolio of products is to integrate our current apps tighter together. From the end-users’ point of view, it should not matter whether they need guidance at work, a checklist to remind them about critical tasks, real-time data to tackle issues or go all the way to full control over the system via AR. All they need to do is to put on the device and the data they need is always within easy reach.
In 2020, we ran into the same wall as everyone else: COVID-19. We needed to rethink our own targets. How could we use our expertise in AR and the industry to best help our customers? We didn’t take long to act. The SmartEyes solution was launched during the spring of 2020. We had developed a completely new product in only some weeks - a pretty amazing effort from our development team. The SmartEyes solution helps companies work efficiently from distance, enabling experts, colleagues, and partners to see remote processes and communicate with each other without a fuss. Remote support and video conferencing solutions are not a new thing but clearly, there is a need for a solution that is simple to set up and use, works in challenging industrial environments and lets the other party see more than a video call can. Winning the Kiilto remote process challenge was a great sign that we were going in the right direction.
At the moment, the majority of our clients are looking for digital solutions that solve
challenges caused by the pandemic. The vast majority of these challenges concern remote
operations. We have been thrilled to notice that SmartEyes getting attention also in other
fields. No surprise as the problem is universal: regardless of the business we are in, most of us need to keep working with a colleague in the neighboring city, in another country, or on the opposite side of the world.
Today we’re an enthusiastic and growing team of experts located in four different countries:
Finland, Taiwan, Japan, and Kenya. We are operating globally with our customers. Our key
strength: combining experience, our own technology, and a passion to develop new things while listening carefully to the needs of our customers. The challenges are not going anywhere, and we want to be a long-term partner on your AR journey.
Learn more from us: www.augumenta.com
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