On Wednesday, The company announced a partnership with du, a leading telecommunications provider for businesses in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to provide access to smart glass applications to du’s 70,000+ business clients. Du and APX Labs will demonstrate their solution at GITEX Technology Week 2014 (18-22 October).
The key applications that APX Labs can deliver on smart glasses, whether it is Google Glass, Epson Moverio BT-200, Vuzix or others, are the communication capabilities, the navigation feature and overlay that augments the work environment. Healthcare professionals, maintenance teams and logistics staffs are the one who will benefit the most from this technology. APX Labs’ solution allows users to operate hands free while receiving key information to perform their tasks on screen and enables visual and audio communications with their team members directly in the glasses.
I have seen two demos powered by APX Labs, one with the Espon smart glass a few months ago, and one this week with Google Glass. The latest one was a demo of a 3D view of a piece of equipment that needed maintenance, from an application available in the Sales Force suite.
I could perfectly see the 3D object and manipulate it with the Glass interface or using gestures, thanks to the Myo band (see in the photo below). This will be great for workers who cannot touch their glasses during the time they need to access the information. That particular demo with the SalesForce integration is not shown in the video above.
There has been a lot of controversy about Google Glass’ consumer usage, some people were rejected from restaurants and bars for filming people around them, however, I am really convinced that enterprise applications provide the best value for the smart glass technologies.
According to Brian Ballard, CEO APX Labs, in addition to the healthcare professionals, his platform gets a lot of traction from the oil and gas industry, a field where regulations are pretty strict and where maintenance workers have to follow very precise guidelines, an information that can be made easily available on the glasses rather than in thick books that are hard to manipulate while repairing the equipments.