Smart Eyewear

Smart Eyewear: why it will become part of your Field Service operations

The hype is now behind us and reality is kicking in. Smart Eyewear or perhaps more correctly known as ‘Optical Head Mounted Displays’ (OHMD) has shown off its promise for adoption in field service operations, whilst at the same time demonstrating where the current state of the technology still has some way to go.

So why is this so relevant to field service organisations? Let’s first look at its promise. Today’s best-in-class field service organisations have realized the emergence of field service workforce that has the ability to be collaborative, so that it has the potential to transform service and the relationship with the customer. Today, these customers are becoming much more demanding and are expecting first time fix quickly and expertly, delivering an outstanding customer experience.

In order to achieve this there is a constant look-out for new and emerging technologies. Gartner recently identified that smart glasses with augmented reality and head-mounted cameras can increase the efficiency significantly. Gartner believes that these efficiencies have the potential to generate an increase in profits of $1billion annually from 2017. 

The greatest savings would be derived from diagnosing and fixing problems more quickly and with a significantly reduced number of repeat visits or involvement of additional experts at customer sites.

Other benefits of using smart eyewear in field service operations have been identified. For instance, a video can be stored as evidence on how the service job was performed and therefore assist in resolving customer allegations faster. Another obvious benefit is in improved education and training capabilities.  Service engineers could be recording real examples of jobs completed that can be used as a knowledge base for trainees or inexperienced technicians.  Augmented reality would allow essential repair or service information to be projected over the reality that is being witnessed. This would have a real potential to speed up jobs, as well as cut down on accidents.  And naturally, another clear benefit is in enabling a higher level of collaboration between the field service team thereby improving overall levels of knowledge and speed of repairs.

Even though Google has stopped shipments of its Glass prototype model, it hasn’t stopped large companies also exploring the possibilities of using smart eyewear in their field service organisations. Take for instance the pilot project Schlumberger, a global energy giant, embarked on when it equipped a number of its oilfield workers with Glass as part of a workflow management tool.  Not only set they out to explore how they could speed up the operations by becoming ‘hands-free’ instead of using tablets, Schlumberger also used the device to understand why certain type of standardised procedures were taking much longer than was expected.  All the data harvested by Glass was utilised in a backend analytics system to further identify areas for improving their field engineer’s productivity.

Now the real world has tested it, it has facilitated a fast increase in the understanding of the requirements of this technology. Current challenges to overcome include:

• Overheating during video streaming, which was a problem for Google Glass that auto-shutdown typically after streaming video for 30 minutes
• Limited battery life. The Google Glass battery life was less than 30 minutes if it was streaming video. A minimum of 4 hours seems a development goal.
• The quality of video streaming depends on the quality of the connection. If that is 3G it could be a real problem in more remote locations. If it is Wi-Fi, then this tends to be far more reliable.

Thankfully we live in an era where ‘Moore’s law’ still seem to apply and the improvements in technology still occur at an exponential rate.  With the promise of such a strong increase in profitability if smart eyewear was to be used in field service operations, all our ‘eyes’ are now fixed on the next jump forward.  The fact that now multiple vendors are developing, although along slightly different technological directions.

Sony SmartEyeglass Attach introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. Different than Google Glass in that it adds connected intelligence to any kind of existing eyewear.  Sony is using its expertise in action cameras used in extreme sports as well as its enterprise oriented Vaio product line to bring this product forward. Already in version2 of its smart eyewear concept, Sony is encouraging developers to build application for its platform, especially now Google has taken its prototype Google Glass off the market.

Google Glass is by no means dead. Google started selling a prototype to qualified ‘Glass Explorers’ in 2013 and it became available to the public in 2014. Having raked up a lot of input, feedback etc… Google decided that it had enough information to take the product to the next level and announced a stop to selling the prototype in January 2015. As they put it: Google Glass was ready to graduate from Google Labs into a proper new division.

Microsoft is experimenting with its HoloLens, a futuristic headset computer that can project ‘holograms’ into your surrounding environment promising to blend the digital world into the real world. It is positioning the HoloLens across a very wide spectrum including for on-the-job teaching/advising, one of the key areas in field service where this type of technology is expected to reap benefits.  The expectation is that the first prototypes will be made available later this year.

And then there are other players such as Motorola Solutions and Vuzix who have come to market with working, real-life examples of what is possible.  When so many tech giants are busy with it, you can only assume that other tech players are also putting their thinking cap on and continue to invest in the same field of OHMD.

So, of course the question is on when and how to integrate smart eyewear into your field service operations.  Key is to work closely with whoever is your trusted advisor for field service enabling technology.  Establish with them a regular review on what is available and how viable it would be to introduce it. The great news is that the number of tech-savvy workers is steadily increasing and they will be expecting the freedom to engage and utilise the latest technologies that they are using at home.

And if Gartner’s prediction is right (and why not) then within five years at least 10% of companies with offsite workers will be using smart eyewear in their jobs, growing to 50% in the next ten years. Before you know it, it will be as normal as having moved from pen & paper to a smartphone.