What is Assisted Reality ?
We have all heard of virtual reality and augmented reality, yet people still ask "What is assisted reality?".
Assisted reality refers to any technology that allows a user to view pertinent information within his field of view, without having to physically manipulate a device. 
Assisted reality devices, such as models available from Realwear and Vuzix, have started transforming standard workforces, to digital workforces. There are many reasons behind the growing popularity of these devices, among them being that they help increase productivity while maintaining safety as the primary concern.

The future of work:

Some of the socio-economic impacts that this pandemic has brought upon us will be felt for years to come. One of these impacts being how we work. Accenture's Future of Work Study 2021 of more than 9,000 workers around the world discovered that most people want a hybrid model, where they sometimes work remotely and sometimes go onsite. What does this mean to the future of our workforce and the enterprises that employ them. 

Many employees took the down time that the pandemic provided to re-evaluate their priorities and re-determine their future. Already many enterprises are noticing a lack of resources available in certain fields. Moving forward, emphasis will be on enterprises to provide the proper tools and technologies to respond to the employee's desired new working environment.

Optimizing the resources that ensure a healthy and productive workforce, regardless of physical location, can be daunting. Why do we believe it will be a worthwhile goal for organizations to pursue? Because organizations will see bottom-line benefits from having a workforce that is motivated, productive, and safe.

• 63% of high-growth organizations have enabled productivity anywhere workforce models. Source: The future of work
• 69% of negative or no-growth companies are still focused on where people are going to physically work (favoring all onsite or remote rather than enable hybrid).  Source: The future of work

Connected worker experiences can increase productivity and help enterprises retain talent and therefore offer a competitive advantage. 

According to a recent McKinsey report on rethinking strategies for a post pandemic era: Source - McKinsey Report

"One marker of technology’s increasing importance to both strategy and operations is that companies devoted more resources to their digital and technology capabilities during the pandemic, even as they cut resources from other parts of the business. According to the survey results, the funding of digital and technology initiatives increased, as did the numbers of full-time equivalents in digital and technology roles."

AR devices are being used today for training, industrial IoT, remote assistance and more. Enterprises have already realized significant cost savings in reduced travel expenditures, accelerated training and onboarding, and reduced impact due to failures. These savings will continue into the future.

What about ROI ?

Business cases should always be built based on risk / impact analysis, but are usually accepted based on cost / benefit scenarios. To be cost effective, AR devices need to show that they are capable of mitigating risk, and if that fails, they should be able to minimize the impact on business. While soft costs are usually lower on the priority list, here are some benefits to implementing AR devices:

• Drive process compliance and quality
• Lower time to access information
• Use hands-free without compromising PPE
• Workaround to travel restrictions
• Maintain situational awareness
• Bring knowledge to operator at the moment of need

Moving on to hard cost scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Eliminate the need for experts to travel. At a cost of approximately $2,500 per AR device, these devices pay for themselves by eliminating the need for experts to travel on-site. The device can justify its cost by avoiding 1-2 trips during its lifecycle.

Scenario 2:

Consider a company that has 50 technicians on the payroll earning an average of $25 / hour. Based on a 40 hour workweek and 261 working days per year, each technician costs the company $52,000 excluding benefits. Total yearly salaries for 50 technicians would cost the company $2.6M per year. The cost for equipping each technician with an AR device would be $2,500 for a total of $125,000.

If these devices can save the technicians an average of 20 minutes per day by providing information when they need it, or by contacting a remote expert to assist with a problem, it would come out to 87 hours saved yearly per technician. This represents a  dollar value of $108,750 yearly across all technicians.