HoloLens application PickAR promises to save e-tailers millions.

Much has been made of the use of robots to increase efficiency in warehouses – with e-tailers such as Amazon announcing significant investment in that area. But as impressive as those robots might look, they are still extremely expensive, and much better suited for picking large items and crates rather than putting together individual items to be shipped out to customers. For that, you still need to have a human walking around a warehouse for 8 to 12 hours a day, picking each item out of a shelf by hand.

Robots are still very expensive and better at picking large bulk items
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Most of the order picking in warehouses still has to be done by hand
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But a team of students from Georgia Tech believe they can make that manual process a whole lot more efficient: They developed an application called PickAR, which promises to dramatically streamline that process by using HoloLens Mixed Reality technology.

Oculogx has attracted attention from major retailers like Walmart
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Their company – called Oculogx – has already attracted attention from major retailers such as Walmart, and were the runners up in this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s global student technology entrepreneurship competition.

The team were runners-up in Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition
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The features hands-free barcode scanning and navigation
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The app combines features such as GPS-style mapping and path planning, head-mounted barcode scanning and checklist management into a single hands-free interface. This leaves a warehouse pickers free to use both hands to handle the actual items he needs to pick up, as opposed to managing handheld instruments like a handheld barcode scanner and a clipboard with a checklist.

“In our lab, when we were comparing against other dense picking mechanisms like voice pick, paper pick, and tablet pick, we saw a 37% decrease in the time taken to pick with wearable headsets and an improvement in accuracy,” says Industrial Engineering student and Oculogx Co-Founder Charu Thomas.

She met her Co-Founder Sarthak Srinivas outside the office of Thad Starner (Google Glass’s inventor) at Georgia Tech. As they started talking about their respective mixed reality ideas, they found a common interest in the technology’s supply chain applications – Thomas was looking at maximizing the use of space when packing bins into trucks – so it made sense to join forces and start working together.

Two of the company's Co-founders met outside the Georgia Tech office of Google Glass' inventor
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Microsoft supported the team in developing their idea
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At the time, Wenqi Xian was also working with Srinivas at Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab and she – together with computer science student Cheng Hann Gan – joined the Oculogx team to build their first prototype for HoloHack Atlanta – a HoloLens hackathon sponsored by industrial devices manufacturer ThyssenKrupp.

“Initially, we wanted to build a general mapping application, which could map out a space and then provide directions to get from one place to another within that space. However, while discussing with ThyssenKrupp and Microsoft representatives at the venue, we decided to narrow the scope of the app to warehouses, adding features like barcode scanning and warehouse mapping to focus on improving the efficiency of the order picking process,” explains Gan.

Srinivas had previously studied the logistics of order picking during his research for the Contextual Computing Group (another MR lab he worked in at Georgia Tech) but after the hackathon he started visiting warehouses to get a sense of how order picking actually worked on the ground. Seeing the huge technology gap between what is used in a typical warehouse and what they were working on in the lab convinced them that they were on to something.

“By the time we arrived at the Imagine Cup World Finals in July, we had visited over 20 warehouses and interviewed over 60 people involved in logistics and supply chain relating to our application,” Srinivas recalls.

Based on feedback from judges in the Imagine Cup US Finals – that they would to see the product working in a real warehouse, the next step was to test the app as a paid proof of concept in a real in the metro Atlanta region. This led to them working with Walmart, feeding the company’s historical data into the system and offering them estimates of time savings based on their current operations and the use of Mixed Reality technology in comparison to their current methods.

“We now want to make this a real product rather than just a cool demo,” says Thomas. And Srinivas adds that they have identified several facilities in Europe, Asia, and Australia who have expressed interest in actually piloting the technology, and are in the final stages of deciding which one they will be integrating with for the upcoming proof of concept and pilot which they’re aiming to launch next semester.

Oculogx are also continuing to work together with Walmart, but are not yet disclosing the details of the next phase of the partnership. Given the fact that all the students in the team are now working full-time on product development over the Summer and Srinivas is even taking a break from his studies next semester to focus on PickAR, momentum does seem to be building as more companies are getting wise to the potential of Mixed Reality to increase efficiency and save them money.

This article was originally published on VRScout

This HoloLens App Wants to Save eCommerce Retailers Millions via @alicebonasio https://t.co/StsWjPBitR pic.twitter.com/BcSqiNYVd4

— VRScout (@VRScout) August 26, 2017

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Making E-commerce More Efficient with Mixed Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

This HoloLens visualisation tool enables surgeons to treat chronic heart conditions more effectively.

At this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft hosted dozens of student teams from across the world. They showcased an incredibly broad range of products developed to solve practical problems that ranged from getting rescue workers to disaster zones quickly to helping farmers manage the health of their livestock, improving water quality, battling fake news, and holding politicians to account.

Student teams showcased a huge variety of applications
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Microsoft's vision is to build a mixed reality ecosystem
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And given the company’s vision – which they set out at this year’s Build conference – of developing a Mixed Reality ecosystem, it’s hardly surprising that we also saw a few interesting HoloLens projects cropping up as well. One of those was developed by three Biomedical Engineering students from Xidian University in China, who came up with the idea after meeting at their school’s Innovation Lab.

Xidian University students saw the potential of Mixed Reality for diagnosing heart conditions
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The students had the opportunity during the course of their studies to work with children suffering from congenital heart disease, and found that often a child’s heart was so small that standard examination and diagnosis techniques were entirely unsuitable for them. In fact, in some cases these standard adult procedures could cause serious damage to their tiny and already fragile organs.

This of course caused many problems not only during examination, but consequently later in surgery, as surgeons were not supplied with ideal levels of information about a patient’s heart. The students therefore decided to develop a practical tool that addressed some of those issues. The result was Surgical Assistant, a Windows medical imaging processing platform that allows for both 2D and 3D visualization.

“With our platform we can localize a lesion, and observe all the details of that lesion in a non-invasive way,” explained Maoqing Yang from the Surgical Assistant Team.

Like all this year’s Imagine Cup projects, Surgical Assistant was deployed on Azure, but it additionally based its computer diagnosis and decision-making algorithms on Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Cloud-based healthcare-based virtual applications are a booming area
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Such cloud-based healthcare-based virtual applications are certainly a booming area, and disciplines like surgery in particular – which are highly visual and where building up the right skillset requires many hours of practice – are ideally suited for such solutions, which allow for realistic practice with none of the risks associated with practicing on live patients.

There are indeed a host of examples emerging of Mixed Reality applications being used to train surgeons, many of which are seizing upon the ability of the HoloLens to overlay holograms onto real-world backdrops, as well as its collaborative capabilities. Unlike in VR, the user is able to interact with colleagues and teachers (in the same room or remotely) at the same time as viewing holographic content, which is also shared so that all participants are looking at the same thing in real time.

This works to closely replicate the dynamics of an operating room, and is already yielding positive results, which will likely improve dramatically once haptic technology develops further to allow for fine-tuning of factors around touch, pressure and feel which are crucial in surgery.

The application replicates the dynamics of an operating room
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Although the Surgical Assistant team were prevented by visa issues from attending the finals at Microsoft’s Headquarters in Redmond, WA, they still worked with several senior company staff to improve and develop the structure of the product, and are optimistic about the prospects of deploying and scaling their product. They now plan on continuing to develop the product in partnership with more hospitals and deploying the tool to help may more young patients suffering from such chronic heart conditions.

“We have developed this system for over 2 years, and we have tested it in a hospital environment. Now we want to let more people know about our work and collaborate with whoever is interested to solve these problems,” concludes Yang.

This article was originally published on VRScout

A Mixed Reality Application to Heal Young Hearts via @alicebonasio https://t.co/ooSxIJfD9t pic.twitter.com/gqV190nisr

— VRScout (@VRScout) August 17, 2017

If you would like to find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers Virtual Reality Consultancy

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Healing Hearts with Mixed Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

The winners of the 15^th anniversary edition of the Imagine Cup were just announced in Redmond this morning. Xglu from the Czech Republic developed an app that gives children with diabetes a cheap, easy and reliable way to measure and monitor their glucose levels.

The focus of the Microsoft Imagine Cup is on taking ideas from concept to market, asking how you create value
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Instead of lugging around bulky batteries and embarrassing looking medical equipment, kids have small, cute attachment (about the size of a business card) which links to smartphones and takes accurate measurements in seconds.

Not only that, but the whole process is turned into a game, where children collect strawberries as they complete what – let’s face it – is not traditionally a fun task, i.e. pricking your finger and taking blood. And because all the data is loaded automatically to the cloud, it gives both children and parents a much better way to monitor their condition in the long term.

And this was far from unique to Xglu, as this year’s Imagine Cup was very much a cloud-first competition, with all teams required to incorporate it into their projects and $125,000 Azure grant awarded to the winner in addition to the $100,000 prize.

Over the last fifteen years the Imagine Cup program has involved over two million students from over 190 countries, but this is about much more than a bunch of clever ideas competing for a cash jackpot. After two days of watching impossibly clever young people pitch and demo every kind of tech, it became pretty clear that they – and their hosts – meant business.

This is not an accelerator, and these budding entrepreneurs are not officially competing for funding (although doing well here certainly won’t hurt their chances) but the focus is on taking ideas from concept to market, and asking the tough questions about how do you create value from a product, as Anthony Salcito – Microsoft’s Vice President of Worldwide Education – explained:

These ideas are enabled by real needs, and we want to move beyond specific narrow solutions towards those which have a much broader impact.

Small problems often add up to a lot of wasted time; A point that the team from Morocco – who had invented a solution to help match drivers with the nearest available parking space – drove home when they told the audience that the average Parisian will lose a year’s worth of their lives looking for parking spaces.

One thing I found rather refreshing was seeing that different teams were often working on very similar projects. There were two apps (Blink and Orai) which offered personalized feedback to improve a user’s public speaking skills and at least 3 teams (From Brazil, Mexico and the US) focusing on analysing and monitoring water quality, which can have high impact on farming, aquaculture and disease prevention.

It’s not so much about coming up with a unique idea, but executing it in the real world
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At the end of the day that’s a much more accurate reflection of how the tech ecosystem actually works. It’s not so much about coming up with a unique idea, but pushing past that “Eureka” moment, putting in the hard graft, and executing it in the real world.

Continue reading on The Next Web

Microsoft wants students to have their heads in the cloud https://t.co/1l3Obcn0ar

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) July 27, 2017

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Imagine Cup 2017 Winner Announced appeared first on Tech Trends.

After a fantastic #MSBuild2017 Tech Trends is heading back to Seattle for the Imagine Cup

Now in its 15^th year, the Microsoft Imagine Cup brings together some of the world’s smartest students to create solutions with the potential for global impact. 54 teams from all around the world will come together at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ to compete now only for a $100,000 prize, but also a $120,000 Azure grant and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup finals will take place on July 27th
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The finals will take place on July 27^th and we’ll be covering the stories and projects in more detail then, but in the meantime, meet the teams below!

I wish all the teams traveling to Seattle the best of luck. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store for us!

You won’t want to miss any of the action, so be sure to tune into the Imagine Cup Championship via a special webcast at 9 a.m. PT on July 27 on Microsoft Imagine.

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Tech Trends @ Microsoft Imagine Cup 2017 appeared first on Tech Trends.