
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
PTC LiveWorx is
Alan: You’re listening to the XR
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike: Hey, Alan, it’s great to
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Mike: June, yep.
Alan: My God. I had no idea,
Mike: Well, PTC’s focus is
Alan: It’s amazing. You even had
Mike: We did, we did, yeah. One
Alan: Yeah. So let’s start from
Mike: Ok. So PTC is a billion-dollar plus software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. We have been around for a long time and we got our start back in the late 80s, early 90s by revolutionizing the 3D solid modeling industry. Basically, we invented a better mousetrap that allowed companies to create products virtually in 3D much faster and more effectively than ever before. Fast forward from then, we not only have a 3D solid modeling CAD offering, we have a great offering used in engineering for lifecycle management. And about 10 years ago, we recognized the trend of the Internet of Things, this explosion of connectivity and ubiquity of sensors, and companies wanting to leverage that information so that they could create products and manufacture products and service products better. We invested pretty heavily at that time. And once we did that, we were thinking a lot about this idea of IOT and products broadcasting information about themselves in the form of digital data. And we were thinking about our 3D heritage and we recognized that augmented reality was a great way to unlock some of that digital data in the context of the physical world, where you do your work. And that’s really what got us into AR. I have been at PTC — as you said — for a long, long time. And I’ve been involved in our AR journey since the beginning and it’s been a fantastic ride.
Alan: Vuforia was an
Mike: So we were thinking about
Alan: I have no idea the details
Mike: That’s really the value of the combination of sort of this underlying industry-leading computer vision technology and the knowledge that PTC — because of our heritage and our domain expertise and our technology in the form of CAD, and PLM, and IOT — is really the fusion of all of those things that makes these amazing experiences — like the ones you saw it LiveWorx — possible. And what we’ve found is it’s that combination that is required in order to unlock this potential in the industrial space. If you show up to a– pick your favorite large industrial customer and you show up with a great computer vision SDK and Unity and you say, “listen, we can go build anything.” They say, “OK, that’s great.” And they go build something, but it doesn’t scale. And that’s really the key, if you’re gonna be successful in an industrial enterprise. They need scale. They need re-use. They need these approaches to work across a variety of different use cases and product configurations. And the complexity gets pretty mindblowing. And that’s the experience. That’s the expertise that PTC brings to the equation here. So I think it’s been a great combination so far, and I think we’ve got a bright future ahead, for sure.
Alan: There is so much to unpack
Mike: Yeah, well, remember
On top of that library, though, PTC has then taken that technology and we’ve built purpose-built offerings for things like — as you said — you-see-what-I-see, or expert knowledge capture, or an offering that we call Vuforia Studio, which lets you leverage 3D CAD data you already have and present step-by-step instructions with animated 3D to make it very, very clear. I think that’s probably how you were able to replace those brake calipers at LiveWorx, right? You were using augmented 3D instructions. And what’s great about that is we’ve been able to make it super easy for our industrial customers to create these experiences at scale. As far as the answer to your question, it’s probably about 50-50 in terms of customers that are using the Vuforia computer vision SDK to go build all kinds of custom things. And the rest of them are really embracing these industrial enterprise use cases with purpose-built solutions that we’re delivering.
Alan: Let’s talk about what these solutions are enabling your customers. So let’s say, for example, we’ll just use John Deere. I was at LiveWorx and I’m walking around and my jaw is literally hanging open the whole time. I’m trying to figure out what do these guys do? I came to LiveWorx thinking, “Oh, they make AR for industry, not thinking anything else.” And then, of course, I realize I get the crash course and “Oh, we make this CAD-like program where you can build a product.” Let’s say you’re fabricating a product digitally and then it’ll also say, let’s enter in the information about that product. I need it to be 500 grams or less, I need it to have this type of tensile strength. And it’ll run all sorts of calculations and give you unique build designs of a product in ways you never could possibly think of as a human. And it’s a collection of all of these tools that are serving this customer. So let’s just take John Deere for a second. I put on a RealWear headset and I was able to see a screen in front of my eyes that walked me through step by step on how to change an air filter. Recognize that I’m in front of the tractor, give me the information, said “climb up the tractor,” pull this door open, pull out the filter, replace the filter, do it up. And within three minutes, I had replaced an air filter on a tractor that I would have assumed the air filter was on the front of the tractor, not the back. It turned me into an expert instantly. So what are the types of things that customers are doing then?
Mike: That’s a great example. What you were able to experience is the output of a product that we actually introduced just in May, and that product is called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically we built this product, because there’s a lot of domain knowledge out there in our customers. There are people that have been working in industry for a long, long time. And they’re getting to the point where they’re retiring right here in North America, a lot of the baby boomers are leaving the workforce. And companies have this challenge that when those people leave the workforce, their knowledge goes with them. So what we did is we built this tool called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically what it does is it allows an expert to put on either a RealWear device or a Hololens, and basically just do their job. So what happened in the demo you saw is we had an expert come in and teach us all how to replace the air filter. They went through and they did their job. And when they were done doing their job, we took the device and we plugged it into a computer. And we extracted all of the video, all of the spoken word, all of the bookmarks and pictures, everything that they captured as they did their job. And we prepared that, kind of enhanced it a little bit, structured it, and we published out a procedure. And that procedure is then presented back, either on a RealWear device or on a Hololens or on a phone or a tablet or frankly, I mean, you can even dump it out to Word, if you want it on paper. But that’s all we’re talking about here today. So who wants that?
But what you saw was the result of that, which basically provides procedural guidance. And this is — again — a new product we introduced in May. The market reception to this has been outstanding. I mean, again, this is a real problem that companies are facing every single day. And this is a great solution to that problem, taking advantage of some of the latest technology. That’s just one of the things that we allow you to do. That’s — again — the newest offering. And that’s one demonstration you might have seen. The one where you did the brake repair, that’s one where the situation was a little bit different there. What we were trying to teach you was not something that somebody had in their head, but sort of an engineered procedure. That was a procedure that somebody either in service planning or maybe manufacturing process planning, they would have defined ahead of time and there would be engineering deliverables, animations, and sequences, and prepared processes for that. So in that case, we got to leverage 3D engineering data and use that to present to you how to get the job done. And what we’ve realized in our AR journey here, is that there are different constraints on affordances that a company might have. They might not have 3D. They might have knowledge in people’s heads. And Expert Capture is important. They might just need to be able to access an expert remotely. And that’s where our you-see-what-I-see — or we call it Vuforia Chalk — offering is most relevant. Or they might have a highly engineered set of information that they want to present to somebody. And really that whole spectrum has to be respected. And we’re trying to embrace that with a true enterprise AR suite.
Alan: What are some of the other
Mike: Yeah. So there are four
Alan: Yeah, the first time I saw
Mike: Could have been, yep.
Alan: Three years ago. And you guys were not trying to reinvent the wheel with like, “Hey, we need to have image recognition that’s precise”. It was “No, here’s a barcode. Look at the barcode, it’ll recognize it, and then overlay the data.” And I thought that– QR code, not barcode — and I thought sometimes we as developers, we’re overthinking things. A QR code allows you to identify an object really quickly, rather than try to put it through a database of a thousand machines that all look the same. That was a really easy way to do it. And then once you’ve got that, you can just add annotations, you can bring in CAD data, you can overlay the CAD 3D model on top of the actual physical unit and teach people how to use it. Teach me how to fix it, that sort of thing. And that was three years ago. And what I saw this year was basically the real practical use cases of that technology. There was kind of like a coffee machine, I think was the demo. And now it’s expanded to boats, and tractors, and all sorts of things. What’s the craziest thing that you’ve seen somebody work on using AR?
Mike: Well, let me make a really
What we’ve learned is that it’s really important to meet the market where they are. There’s all kinds of crazy things that we could potentially do. And a trap that customers often fall into, is they imagine the most outlandish thing that AR computer vision technology *could* do for them. And what we try to encourage them to do is identify things that are practical, that are going to have a business impact, that are going to be valuable and move the needle. And frankly are achievable, let’s go do something bite-size and make an impact, and then build off of that success and go on. So there’s this element of pragmatism. There’s this idea of meeting the market where it is, not showing up and saying “You’ve got to spend bajillions of dollars.” or “You need the most outlandish high-end hardware.” or whatever the case may be. Just identifying business problems that they have, that are well-suited with AR technology that’s available today and then going off and solving problems for them. So I’m glad you saw that a few years ago. And that’s a mantra that we really hold dear and continue to drive into our customers.
Alan: One of my previous
Mike: That’s right.
Alan: I mean, that’s a big
Mike: Yeah, I mean that– and
Alan: One of the things that you guys have done very well, is being advocates in promoting augmented reality to the industrial workforce. And one of the things that you did was a joint piece with the Harvard Business Review called “A Manager’s Guide To AR,” but it was also AR-enabled. So if you downloaded the app, you could bring the white paper to life, and this factory popped up. What was the genesis of that?
Mike: It’s been an interesting
Alan: We’re still very early in this technology and you guys are pushing the limits so you have more experience than most. But one thing that I found really amazing is that I was at a bicycle show recently, and the Cannondale bikes have a– well, it’s a custom, it doesn’t say PTC, but I recognized the shape. They have a QR code on them. How are they using that? I didn’t pull out my phone and make it work, but I saw the Thingworx tag on the bicycle. Now, is that shipping with every bicycle? What are they doing with that?
Mike: So that’s actually called a Thingmark. It’s a combination QR code and AR marker. So basically it provides unique identification, so our system knows what bike is this? And then we use it also to place the content. It’s 000 for the augmented content. And what Cannondale is doing, is they originally wanted to help their technicians in your local bike shop — their dealer network, if you will — understand the new features on their bikes. For some of their bikes — it’s not available on all of them, but some of their higher-end bikes — they built an AR experience. And that AR experience does a couple of things. It teaches the dealer what the important features are of the bike. So what are the new capabilities and what are the performance specs and all of those kinds of things? It also provides them service instructions for how to do certain things to the bike, replace the shocks, or whatever the case may be. And then finally, it also provides spare parts identification. So the technician, instead of pulling out apart and trying to find it in a manual or find it online somewhere, they can simply look at the bike. And then in AR they see what all the part numbers are so they can order replacement parts.
Alan: That’s amazing.
Mike: It’s a very, very cool
Alan: [chuckles] Yes, you do.
Mike: Their customers, as well
Alan: It’s interesting you say
Mike: Oh, that’s awesome.
Alan: [laughs]
Mike: The unintended uses of
Alan: Some companies are seeing
Mike: Yeah, it well, it’s my
Alan: What are some use cases
Mike: I think that the potential impact for AR across the industrial value chain is deeply profound. It will fundamentally change the way that we interact with the world around us. But when you factor in the reality of where does content come from? How comfortable is digital eyewear? Can I work truly hands-free, with all of the benefits that AR promises, for an entire shift? Some of those things aren’t quite there yet. And then frankly, the computer vision technology is still maturing. It gets better every quarter. We come out with great new innovations, but it’s not a human eye connected to a human brain yet, not yet anyway. Those limitations can get in the way of some of the more advanced use cases. But as we’ve talked a little bit about, there’s so much potential impact right now, whether it’s capturing expert knowledge, sharing expert knowledge in real-time, or presenting compelling instructions and other 3D and digital data in the context of the physical world. And what we’re really encouraging our customers and our clients is to work with us to identify those opportunities, and let’s go drive some real value there.
Alan: That’s like music to my
Mike: Absolutely.
Alan: How is Mattel using AR?
Mike: Yeah, I would speak for Mattel and many of the other toymakers. A lot of them are Vuforia customers. And what they’re doing is they’re recognizing that the nature of play is changing. You and I grew up with Hot Wheels. You and I did not grow up with iPads. [chuckles] And kids today, they do. So the challenge for some of these toymakers is, how do they bring a digital element into the physical world of the toys that they make, whether we’re talking about Lego, whether we’re talking about Hot Wheels, whether we’re talking about Mattel and a hundred other companies. Augmented reality gives them the ability to do that. It gives them the ability to supplement their physical toys with an experience, whether it be animations or gameplay. All of those kinds of things, which really resonates with the kids that are playing these games today. So that’s a great space for us. And we’re really lucky to have a lot of great toymaker customers using our AR tools.
Alan: You actually mentioned Lego and I know Lego has been doing a ton of stuff in AR over the last few years. We had Eden [Chen] from Fishermen Labs on the show and they’ve done a lot of work with Lego in Denmark, to not only animate the boxes, but– I was just on actually, if you go in walmart.com/lego and then you click the “see it in action” button, you can now drop the Legos toy set on your table, and see it animated and see how it plays in front of you. And I mean, that’s all web-based.
Mike: That is very cool.
Alan: Let’s take a look at that. So right now, everything that you’re building is app-based. Are you guys moving towards a web-based offering in the future, or is that something on the roadmap?
Mike: It’s something where we’re looking at. As with everything else, as technology proliferates and standards are established and embraced, we really have the opportunity to drive this democratization even further. So that’s something that we’re there were researching. The advanced research team is looking at that. What I can tell you right now, is that app-based is really what the foreseeable future has for us. Whether that app is a broadly applicable viewer, like we have with Vuforia View, or custom-tailore apps that a toymaker like Lego or an automaker like Mercedes Benz will make for a particular use case, doesn’t really matter. But in the near term, that’s really where a lot of the focus is.
Alan: One of the things that people have to realize is that companies like RealWear, for example, RealWear is a head-worn display that allows you to move this articulating arm into your side of view and see almost like a maybe 10 inch iPad, 10 inches from your face so that you can see stuff. But it’s not really AR. It’s just kind of augmenting, giving you a screen. It is, by all accounts, the lowest possible tech of this. It’s not doing image recognition, it’s just literally showing you either PDFs, or videos, or information and being able to capture that using a camera and project it back. And they just raised $80-million. So I think we’re– as a collective group, we need to take a step back from trying to invent the future of the future of the future, and say “Hey, the tools we have right now are driving real ROI value. How do we leverage those the most so that we can fund the future of the future kind of things?” And I think you guys have done a great job on that.
Mike: We’ve got a great
Alan: You really hit it there.
Mike: Yeah, but like you said earlier, it’s early days. I am quite sure that the folks that Magic Leap are going to recognize how much value there is in the enterprise space, and figure out that they’ve got to have certain characteristics. And I think that there’s a lot to happen in front of us in the realm of digital eyewear. Sometimes I think about 15 years ago when maybe you had a smartphone with a great camera, and I had one with a huge screen, and my friend Matt had one with a keyboard on it.
Alan: If you’re talking fifteen years ago, I had a belt. And I had a phone on one side, I had my camera on the other side, I had my Palm Pilot, which wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, which was just literally a calendar on the backside. I looked like Batman, I had a bat belt.
Mike: All right. But what do you
Alan: There is a black device
Mike: Not taking the bait.
Alan: Ahhh, dammit! [laughs]
Mike: [laughs] I do believe that
Alan: Yeah.
Mike: We have no idea what Apple
Alan: It’s interesting. The
Mike: They’re just audio, right.
Alan: But they’re direct — literally direct competitor — to the Bose AR offering, the Bose glasses.
Mike: Yep.
Alan: Assuming they’re going to be pretty awesome, because I tried them out and spatial audio, I think, is actually going to drive a lot of value, just with the audio.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I would say
Alan: Oh, speaking of touch.
Mike: I have. I was at EWTS last
Alan: I got to play with the
Mike: It’s mindblowing.
Alan: –mindblowing. [laughs] It
Mike: It’s an application for a remote expert assistance. So it basically allows you to see what I see, and it allows both of us — while we’re speaking to each other — to draw on a live video stream of the real world. And what’s interesting about that, is that we’re drawing on this live video stream and what we draw actually sticks to the real world. So this isn’t a case where I take a picture, send it to you, you circle something, send it back to me. We’re both looking at my view of the real world. And if you see something you want to draw my attention to, you simply draw an arrow, draw a circle, whatever the case may be. And no matter where I look, when I come back to that spot, those annotations will be fixed there in space. So this is a tool that is really key for helping, let’s say a junior technician, somebody that’s a novice out in the field. This is allowing companies to save money on rolling a second service truck. It’s allowing them to increase their first-time fix rate. And one of the most exciting things about this technology is that it works on a really, really broad collection of devices. So, you know, the reality is most technicians out in the field, they probably have an iPhone, they probably have something running AndroidOS. And this technology works on many, many of those. It doesn’t require — for example — ARKit enabled devices or anything like that.
Alan: Being able to have an
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think–
Alan: It’s one of those things
Mike: What problem do I want to
Alan: I want to say thank you. This has been an eye-opener. PTC’s LiveWorx. If you haven’t been to LiveWorx, you gotta go the next year. The stage that you guys set up at that event rivaled EDM stages. It was incredible. Multi-level stage with lights and lasers, and it was just mindblowing. And you really know how to bring people together in the context of industrial applications. You could feel the palpable energy. So visit ptc.com to learn more. Yeah. Is there anything you want to add, Mike?
Mike: No way, man. I wouldn’t
4.5
1212 ratings
PTC LiveWorx is
Alan: You’re listening to the XR
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike: Hey, Alan, it’s great to
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Mike: June, yep.
Alan: My God. I had no idea,
Mike: Well, PTC’s focus is
Alan: It’s amazing. You even had
Mike: We did, we did, yeah. One
Alan: Yeah. So let’s start from
Mike: Ok. So PTC is a billion-dollar plus software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. We have been around for a long time and we got our start back in the late 80s, early 90s by revolutionizing the 3D solid modeling industry. Basically, we invented a better mousetrap that allowed companies to create products virtually in 3D much faster and more effectively than ever before. Fast forward from then, we not only have a 3D solid modeling CAD offering, we have a great offering used in engineering for lifecycle management. And about 10 years ago, we recognized the trend of the Internet of Things, this explosion of connectivity and ubiquity of sensors, and companies wanting to leverage that information so that they could create products and manufacture products and service products better. We invested pretty heavily at that time. And once we did that, we were thinking a lot about this idea of IOT and products broadcasting information about themselves in the form of digital data. And we were thinking about our 3D heritage and we recognized that augmented reality was a great way to unlock some of that digital data in the context of the physical world, where you do your work. And that’s really what got us into AR. I have been at PTC — as you said — for a long, long time. And I’ve been involved in our AR journey since the beginning and it’s been a fantastic ride.
Alan: Vuforia was an
Mike: So we were thinking about
Alan: I have no idea the details
Mike: That’s really the value of the combination of sort of this underlying industry-leading computer vision technology and the knowledge that PTC — because of our heritage and our domain expertise and our technology in the form of CAD, and PLM, and IOT — is really the fusion of all of those things that makes these amazing experiences — like the ones you saw it LiveWorx — possible. And what we’ve found is it’s that combination that is required in order to unlock this potential in the industrial space. If you show up to a– pick your favorite large industrial customer and you show up with a great computer vision SDK and Unity and you say, “listen, we can go build anything.” They say, “OK, that’s great.” And they go build something, but it doesn’t scale. And that’s really the key, if you’re gonna be successful in an industrial enterprise. They need scale. They need re-use. They need these approaches to work across a variety of different use cases and product configurations. And the complexity gets pretty mindblowing. And that’s the experience. That’s the expertise that PTC brings to the equation here. So I think it’s been a great combination so far, and I think we’ve got a bright future ahead, for sure.
Alan: There is so much to unpack
Mike: Yeah, well, remember
On top of that library, though, PTC has then taken that technology and we’ve built purpose-built offerings for things like — as you said — you-see-what-I-see, or expert knowledge capture, or an offering that we call Vuforia Studio, which lets you leverage 3D CAD data you already have and present step-by-step instructions with animated 3D to make it very, very clear. I think that’s probably how you were able to replace those brake calipers at LiveWorx, right? You were using augmented 3D instructions. And what’s great about that is we’ve been able to make it super easy for our industrial customers to create these experiences at scale. As far as the answer to your question, it’s probably about 50-50 in terms of customers that are using the Vuforia computer vision SDK to go build all kinds of custom things. And the rest of them are really embracing these industrial enterprise use cases with purpose-built solutions that we’re delivering.
Alan: Let’s talk about what these solutions are enabling your customers. So let’s say, for example, we’ll just use John Deere. I was at LiveWorx and I’m walking around and my jaw is literally hanging open the whole time. I’m trying to figure out what do these guys do? I came to LiveWorx thinking, “Oh, they make AR for industry, not thinking anything else.” And then, of course, I realize I get the crash course and “Oh, we make this CAD-like program where you can build a product.” Let’s say you’re fabricating a product digitally and then it’ll also say, let’s enter in the information about that product. I need it to be 500 grams or less, I need it to have this type of tensile strength. And it’ll run all sorts of calculations and give you unique build designs of a product in ways you never could possibly think of as a human. And it’s a collection of all of these tools that are serving this customer. So let’s just take John Deere for a second. I put on a RealWear headset and I was able to see a screen in front of my eyes that walked me through step by step on how to change an air filter. Recognize that I’m in front of the tractor, give me the information, said “climb up the tractor,” pull this door open, pull out the filter, replace the filter, do it up. And within three minutes, I had replaced an air filter on a tractor that I would have assumed the air filter was on the front of the tractor, not the back. It turned me into an expert instantly. So what are the types of things that customers are doing then?
Mike: That’s a great example. What you were able to experience is the output of a product that we actually introduced just in May, and that product is called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically we built this product, because there’s a lot of domain knowledge out there in our customers. There are people that have been working in industry for a long, long time. And they’re getting to the point where they’re retiring right here in North America, a lot of the baby boomers are leaving the workforce. And companies have this challenge that when those people leave the workforce, their knowledge goes with them. So what we did is we built this tool called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically what it does is it allows an expert to put on either a RealWear device or a Hololens, and basically just do their job. So what happened in the demo you saw is we had an expert come in and teach us all how to replace the air filter. They went through and they did their job. And when they were done doing their job, we took the device and we plugged it into a computer. And we extracted all of the video, all of the spoken word, all of the bookmarks and pictures, everything that they captured as they did their job. And we prepared that, kind of enhanced it a little bit, structured it, and we published out a procedure. And that procedure is then presented back, either on a RealWear device or on a Hololens or on a phone or a tablet or frankly, I mean, you can even dump it out to Word, if you want it on paper. But that’s all we’re talking about here today. So who wants that?
But what you saw was the result of that, which basically provides procedural guidance. And this is — again — a new product we introduced in May. The market reception to this has been outstanding. I mean, again, this is a real problem that companies are facing every single day. And this is a great solution to that problem, taking advantage of some of the latest technology. That’s just one of the things that we allow you to do. That’s — again — the newest offering. And that’s one demonstration you might have seen. The one where you did the brake repair, that’s one where the situation was a little bit different there. What we were trying to teach you was not something that somebody had in their head, but sort of an engineered procedure. That was a procedure that somebody either in service planning or maybe manufacturing process planning, they would have defined ahead of time and there would be engineering deliverables, animations, and sequences, and prepared processes for that. So in that case, we got to leverage 3D engineering data and use that to present to you how to get the job done. And what we’ve realized in our AR journey here, is that there are different constraints on affordances that a company might have. They might not have 3D. They might have knowledge in people’s heads. And Expert Capture is important. They might just need to be able to access an expert remotely. And that’s where our you-see-what-I-see — or we call it Vuforia Chalk — offering is most relevant. Or they might have a highly engineered set of information that they want to present to somebody. And really that whole spectrum has to be respected. And we’re trying to embrace that with a true enterprise AR suite.
Alan: What are some of the other
Mike: Yeah. So there are four
Alan: Yeah, the first time I saw
Mike: Could have been, yep.
Alan: Three years ago. And you guys were not trying to reinvent the wheel with like, “Hey, we need to have image recognition that’s precise”. It was “No, here’s a barcode. Look at the barcode, it’ll recognize it, and then overlay the data.” And I thought that– QR code, not barcode — and I thought sometimes we as developers, we’re overthinking things. A QR code allows you to identify an object really quickly, rather than try to put it through a database of a thousand machines that all look the same. That was a really easy way to do it. And then once you’ve got that, you can just add annotations, you can bring in CAD data, you can overlay the CAD 3D model on top of the actual physical unit and teach people how to use it. Teach me how to fix it, that sort of thing. And that was three years ago. And what I saw this year was basically the real practical use cases of that technology. There was kind of like a coffee machine, I think was the demo. And now it’s expanded to boats, and tractors, and all sorts of things. What’s the craziest thing that you’ve seen somebody work on using AR?
Mike: Well, let me make a really
What we’ve learned is that it’s really important to meet the market where they are. There’s all kinds of crazy things that we could potentially do. And a trap that customers often fall into, is they imagine the most outlandish thing that AR computer vision technology *could* do for them. And what we try to encourage them to do is identify things that are practical, that are going to have a business impact, that are going to be valuable and move the needle. And frankly are achievable, let’s go do something bite-size and make an impact, and then build off of that success and go on. So there’s this element of pragmatism. There’s this idea of meeting the market where it is, not showing up and saying “You’ve got to spend bajillions of dollars.” or “You need the most outlandish high-end hardware.” or whatever the case may be. Just identifying business problems that they have, that are well-suited with AR technology that’s available today and then going off and solving problems for them. So I’m glad you saw that a few years ago. And that’s a mantra that we really hold dear and continue to drive into our customers.
Alan: One of my previous
Mike: That’s right.
Alan: I mean, that’s a big
Mike: Yeah, I mean that– and
Alan: One of the things that you guys have done very well, is being advocates in promoting augmented reality to the industrial workforce. And one of the things that you did was a joint piece with the Harvard Business Review called “A Manager’s Guide To AR,” but it was also AR-enabled. So if you downloaded the app, you could bring the white paper to life, and this factory popped up. What was the genesis of that?
Mike: It’s been an interesting
Alan: We’re still very early in this technology and you guys are pushing the limits so you have more experience than most. But one thing that I found really amazing is that I was at a bicycle show recently, and the Cannondale bikes have a– well, it’s a custom, it doesn’t say PTC, but I recognized the shape. They have a QR code on them. How are they using that? I didn’t pull out my phone and make it work, but I saw the Thingworx tag on the bicycle. Now, is that shipping with every bicycle? What are they doing with that?
Mike: So that’s actually called a Thingmark. It’s a combination QR code and AR marker. So basically it provides unique identification, so our system knows what bike is this? And then we use it also to place the content. It’s 000 for the augmented content. And what Cannondale is doing, is they originally wanted to help their technicians in your local bike shop — their dealer network, if you will — understand the new features on their bikes. For some of their bikes — it’s not available on all of them, but some of their higher-end bikes — they built an AR experience. And that AR experience does a couple of things. It teaches the dealer what the important features are of the bike. So what are the new capabilities and what are the performance specs and all of those kinds of things? It also provides them service instructions for how to do certain things to the bike, replace the shocks, or whatever the case may be. And then finally, it also provides spare parts identification. So the technician, instead of pulling out apart and trying to find it in a manual or find it online somewhere, they can simply look at the bike. And then in AR they see what all the part numbers are so they can order replacement parts.
Alan: That’s amazing.
Mike: It’s a very, very cool
Alan: [chuckles] Yes, you do.
Mike: Their customers, as well
Alan: It’s interesting you say
Mike: Oh, that’s awesome.
Alan: [laughs]
Mike: The unintended uses of
Alan: Some companies are seeing
Mike: Yeah, it well, it’s my
Alan: What are some use cases
Mike: I think that the potential impact for AR across the industrial value chain is deeply profound. It will fundamentally change the way that we interact with the world around us. But when you factor in the reality of where does content come from? How comfortable is digital eyewear? Can I work truly hands-free, with all of the benefits that AR promises, for an entire shift? Some of those things aren’t quite there yet. And then frankly, the computer vision technology is still maturing. It gets better every quarter. We come out with great new innovations, but it’s not a human eye connected to a human brain yet, not yet anyway. Those limitations can get in the way of some of the more advanced use cases. But as we’ve talked a little bit about, there’s so much potential impact right now, whether it’s capturing expert knowledge, sharing expert knowledge in real-time, or presenting compelling instructions and other 3D and digital data in the context of the physical world. And what we’re really encouraging our customers and our clients is to work with us to identify those opportunities, and let’s go drive some real value there.
Alan: That’s like music to my
Mike: Absolutely.
Alan: How is Mattel using AR?
Mike: Yeah, I would speak for Mattel and many of the other toymakers. A lot of them are Vuforia customers. And what they’re doing is they’re recognizing that the nature of play is changing. You and I grew up with Hot Wheels. You and I did not grow up with iPads. [chuckles] And kids today, they do. So the challenge for some of these toymakers is, how do they bring a digital element into the physical world of the toys that they make, whether we’re talking about Lego, whether we’re talking about Hot Wheels, whether we’re talking about Mattel and a hundred other companies. Augmented reality gives them the ability to do that. It gives them the ability to supplement their physical toys with an experience, whether it be animations or gameplay. All of those kinds of things, which really resonates with the kids that are playing these games today. So that’s a great space for us. And we’re really lucky to have a lot of great toymaker customers using our AR tools.
Alan: You actually mentioned Lego and I know Lego has been doing a ton of stuff in AR over the last few years. We had Eden [Chen] from Fishermen Labs on the show and they’ve done a lot of work with Lego in Denmark, to not only animate the boxes, but– I was just on actually, if you go in walmart.com/lego and then you click the “see it in action” button, you can now drop the Legos toy set on your table, and see it animated and see how it plays in front of you. And I mean, that’s all web-based.
Mike: That is very cool.
Alan: Let’s take a look at that. So right now, everything that you’re building is app-based. Are you guys moving towards a web-based offering in the future, or is that something on the roadmap?
Mike: It’s something where we’re looking at. As with everything else, as technology proliferates and standards are established and embraced, we really have the opportunity to drive this democratization even further. So that’s something that we’re there were researching. The advanced research team is looking at that. What I can tell you right now, is that app-based is really what the foreseeable future has for us. Whether that app is a broadly applicable viewer, like we have with Vuforia View, or custom-tailore apps that a toymaker like Lego or an automaker like Mercedes Benz will make for a particular use case, doesn’t really matter. But in the near term, that’s really where a lot of the focus is.
Alan: One of the things that people have to realize is that companies like RealWear, for example, RealWear is a head-worn display that allows you to move this articulating arm into your side of view and see almost like a maybe 10 inch iPad, 10 inches from your face so that you can see stuff. But it’s not really AR. It’s just kind of augmenting, giving you a screen. It is, by all accounts, the lowest possible tech of this. It’s not doing image recognition, it’s just literally showing you either PDFs, or videos, or information and being able to capture that using a camera and project it back. And they just raised $80-million. So I think we’re– as a collective group, we need to take a step back from trying to invent the future of the future of the future, and say “Hey, the tools we have right now are driving real ROI value. How do we leverage those the most so that we can fund the future of the future kind of things?” And I think you guys have done a great job on that.
Mike: We’ve got a great
Alan: You really hit it there.
Mike: Yeah, but like you said earlier, it’s early days. I am quite sure that the folks that Magic Leap are going to recognize how much value there is in the enterprise space, and figure out that they’ve got to have certain characteristics. And I think that there’s a lot to happen in front of us in the realm of digital eyewear. Sometimes I think about 15 years ago when maybe you had a smartphone with a great camera, and I had one with a huge screen, and my friend Matt had one with a keyboard on it.
Alan: If you’re talking fifteen years ago, I had a belt. And I had a phone on one side, I had my camera on the other side, I had my Palm Pilot, which wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, which was just literally a calendar on the backside. I looked like Batman, I had a bat belt.
Mike: All right. But what do you
Alan: There is a black device
Mike: Not taking the bait.
Alan: Ahhh, dammit! [laughs]
Mike: [laughs] I do believe that
Alan: Yeah.
Mike: We have no idea what Apple
Alan: It’s interesting. The
Mike: They’re just audio, right.
Alan: But they’re direct — literally direct competitor — to the Bose AR offering, the Bose glasses.
Mike: Yep.
Alan: Assuming they’re going to be pretty awesome, because I tried them out and spatial audio, I think, is actually going to drive a lot of value, just with the audio.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I would say
Alan: Oh, speaking of touch.
Mike: I have. I was at EWTS last
Alan: I got to play with the
Mike: It’s mindblowing.
Alan: –mindblowing. [laughs] It
Mike: It’s an application for a remote expert assistance. So it basically allows you to see what I see, and it allows both of us — while we’re speaking to each other — to draw on a live video stream of the real world. And what’s interesting about that, is that we’re drawing on this live video stream and what we draw actually sticks to the real world. So this isn’t a case where I take a picture, send it to you, you circle something, send it back to me. We’re both looking at my view of the real world. And if you see something you want to draw my attention to, you simply draw an arrow, draw a circle, whatever the case may be. And no matter where I look, when I come back to that spot, those annotations will be fixed there in space. So this is a tool that is really key for helping, let’s say a junior technician, somebody that’s a novice out in the field. This is allowing companies to save money on rolling a second service truck. It’s allowing them to increase their first-time fix rate. And one of the most exciting things about this technology is that it works on a really, really broad collection of devices. So, you know, the reality is most technicians out in the field, they probably have an iPhone, they probably have something running AndroidOS. And this technology works on many, many of those. It doesn’t require — for example — ARKit enabled devices or anything like that.
Alan: Being able to have an
Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think–
Alan: It’s one of those things
Mike: What problem do I want to
Alan: I want to say thank you. This has been an eye-opener. PTC’s LiveWorx. If you haven’t been to LiveWorx, you gotta go the next year. The stage that you guys set up at that event rivaled EDM stages. It was incredible. Multi-level stage with lights and lasers, and it was just mindblowing. And you really know how to bring people together in the context of industrial applications. You could feel the palpable energy. So visit ptc.com to learn more. Yeah. Is there anything you want to add, Mike?
Mike: No way, man. I wouldn’t