From the 18th to the 20th of October 2016, the “Maintain Europe” fair will open its doors again in Munich, Germany.

This year’s focus of the event is officially on Augmented and Virtual Reality, which makes it an absolute must for us to be there again – not only to showcase the newest features of our product, but especially to display the productive use cases around inspection, maintenance and turnaround management that have been implemented with UBIK®. To provide the most comprehensive approach to modern maintenance management, we have teamed up with our friends from Actemium and Daqri this year. Knowing that successful industrial maintenance is way more than just sophisticated software, we will therefore be able to also show the right hardware and deliver the best service Knowhow.

More information on the event can be found here: www.maintain-europe.com

Mobile and pervasive computing are just two trends that reshaped the way we handle information over the most recent years. The rapid growth of mobile devices and the increasing networking between them lead to an almost unlimited availability of information, which was changing a significant part of our everyday life for good. But the triumph of smart devices also comes with a price, most noticeably the unrestrained creation of data and the accompanying challenges to deal with it. Location based services can deliver great value there, by providing a continuous connection between data and the situation the user is currently in.
“Industry 4.0” and the “Internet of Things” injected pervasive computing into the industrial space. Augmensys was pioneering in leveraging many cutting-edge technologies for the industry from the very beginning, and those movements only confirm our way of bringing new technologies to the point where they deliver real value.

The  calculation for displaying Geo-based-AR information on the display of a smart device requires a lot of information. The position of the Point of Interest (POI), heading, pitch and roll, but most importantly the absolute position of the device. The closer the user is to the POI, the more accurate the positioning needs to be. While satellite-based technologies like GPS deliver a suitable accuracy outdoors, the challenges in indoor localization are incomparably bigger due to signal damping and signal loss. UBIK® can use different technologies for compensation, such as WiFi-Fingerprinting, reference positions and various dead-reckoning algorithms. But especially in the close-up range of a POI, this was still not good enough for the high standards we set ourselves.

This is why Augmensys started to investigate iBeacons and their potential for industrial use cases over a year ago, and today the results are an integral part of UBIK®, offering two different options:

iBeacon-Trilateration for accurate positioning of the mobile device, and
iBeacon-Proximity-Mode for determining areas the user is currently in -> see video at the end of this article

What are iBeacons?

iBeacons are small, battery-powered devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for emitting unique identifiers in continuous intervals. The measured signal strength (RSSI – Received Signal Strength Indicator) is a raw indicator for the distance between the receiver and the Beacon. When receiving signals from at least three Beacons, the position of a mobile device can be calculated based on those measured values.

As a part of the Export Days hosted by the Austrian Economic Chamber (WKO) on June 21^st, 55 young Austrian companies were awarded as “Born Global Champions”. The Award was handed over from State Secretary Harald Mahrer and WKO President Christoph Leitl (see picture).

This special award is for young companies (founded in 2010 and younger) which are acting on an international scale literally since their day of birth, and grow rapidly. This year Augmensys was among those 55 companies and feels very grateful for getting an award for companies “… that are successful worldwide in special areas with excellent products or services”.

The ceremony took place in the WKO SkyLounge, which is offering a fantastic view over the City of Vienna. The award also comes with a company summary printed in a special edition of the international magazine FRESH VIEW, entitled “Austria’s Born Global Champions II”. This magazine will be available in all 109 WKO bases across the globe and Augmensys can be found on page 32. The excellent Augmensys Team deserves a sincerest Thank You, without our dedicated staff such a success would have never been possible.

What was our motivation to take part in this year’s Constantinus? A nomination, of course the prospect of a prize, but above all the conviction that we have achieved something outstanding for our customers.

That’s why we ventured to submit our successful BASF Augmented Reality project. Many companies speculated that they could take home the Constantinus Award, Austria’s largest consulting and IT prize, because it was already awarded for the 14th time and year after year the popularity increased continuously. With the e-mail that invited us as nominees to the gala, it was finally clear that we were among the top 5 of more than 150 submitted projects in the category Industry 4.0/ Internet of Things. Now the guesswork began. Was it possible to read from this email what place we had reached? How do you prepare for the worst-case scenario? Who from the company can attend the big gala in Linz?