Five Reasons Why Assisted Reality Beats Augmented Reality for Enhancing Safety and Efficiency on the Frontline

As digital transformation begins to extend to every aspect of the industrial enterprise, there is a strong focus on the ROI of your investment. Digital transformation has now accelerated and begun to engage, empower and elevate the frontline worker, gaining additional momentum during COVID-19. It’s critical that you land on the right digital solution for the environment in which your team works. Assisted reality-based solutions are your best option when it comes to protecting the safety of your employees in this new world.

We’ve put in so much design thinking into creating solutions that will help safeguard frontline workers. To do this, we started with you, our customer. The resulting solution goes far beyond the form factor of the hardware. We look holistically looked at the entire user experience – both hardware and software.

We understand what you need the device for – what problems you’re solving for, and where mission-critical issues or digital opportunities are occurring. How much digital content should be shown to the worker? What kind of IP or ATEX rating should the product have? Do you work indoors or outdoors? How large (or small) should the display be? How bright should it be? What’s the maximum amount of data that should be displayed? How much should it weigh? How compatible with PPE should it be? And most of all, will can the product enable workers to perform their tasks both efficiently and safely? There are dozens of questions like these that helped us design the flagship RealWear HMT-1 assisted reality device.

Protecting our workers is vital. The U.S. workers suffered nearly 3 million injuries in 2019. Those rates are even higher in manufacturing or equipment maintenance.

We’re keenly aware of the hazards in a factory. We are a proud member of AREA to contribute and learn from the broader enterprise AR community. A few years ago, we contributed to a project to study the potential worker risks of AR in the enterprise.

Why Assisted Reality is The Best Choice for Industrial Workforce Safety and Productivity

We chose assisted reality to create our solutions because of the work environments of the industrial worker.

In fact, here are the top five reasons why assisted reality should be your choice over a more immersive digital experience when it comes to protecting your frontline.

1. Safety through assisted reality is at the core of our commitment to our customers – In fact, safety is listed as the #1 priority in our company’s promise to our customers and their employees.

We have written extensively about the needs of the workforce of the future – and how our products can address them. Their ability to keep frontline workers safe is one of the major why RealWear’s headsets deliver such a tremendous return on investment.

2. Our products are designed for safety first – Our HMT-1 assisted reality device is the world’s leading hands-free remote collaboration tool for the modern frontline worker. Specifically designed for the needs of today’s workforce, the HMT-1 device offers significant safety advantages over handheld tablets, wearables & smart glasses, or plain old paper manuals. These are

• 100% hands-free and voice-controlled. This frees workers to focus solely on the task in front of them. It also enables them to request additional information, take photos or share their screen with internal company experts with simple voice commands, even in high noise environments.

• Totally adjustable to see your surroundings clearly. This includes the ability to move the boom arm out of a worker’s field of vision when not in use so that it does not distract them in any way. Also, the display is monocular, adding the maximum amount of “physical world” to your routine work experience.

• Real-time access to mission-critical information. The HMT-1 provides workers with on-demand access to information, workflow procedures, and remote experts.

Our solutions ensure frontline workers can perform their tasks accurately, effectively – and above all, safely, even if they are in a loud, dirty, or totally remote environment.

3. Our Team of World-Class Assisted Reality Experts Have the Flexibility to Create Industry-Leading Solutions – Assisted reality can be used to address a wide range of industry problems. And RealWear’s in-house team of assisted reality experts know how to use the technology to create innovative solutions.

4. Assisted reality technology can ensure customers get the solutions they need – Through customer success and our training programs, we work closely with our clients’ production, engineering, technology, and HR teams to provide an assisted reality-based solution that addresses the needs of their specific environment.

We then create deployment plans that are suited to each client’s individual needs. Our solutions have helped to improve worker safety and increase productivity in a host of diverse industries worldwide.

5. Assisted Reality Solutions Can Be Designed to Work in Unique and Hazardous Environments – Our products are designed to meet – and even exceed – worker safety requirements in extremely challenging work environments around the world. In fact, our HMT-1Z1 is the World’s Only ATEX Zone 1 C1D1 “Intrinsically Safe” Hands-free Remote Collaboration Tool.

This means that the HMT-1Z1 can be used in workplaces so hazardous that not even smart phones are allowed, for fear they might cause a fire or explosion due to the risk of a micro spark.