New Florence. New Renaissance.

More wearables on the shop floor

At their “Edge Corp” demo plant Plex shows off (as I have written here and here ) Google Glass, Estimote beacons, Honeywell ring scanners, Mitutoyo digital calipers and other emerging technology in use on the shop floor

At PowerPlex this week, Barrie Vince of Plex brought to life in an excellent short session the implementation of some of these tools at their customer, Fisher Dynamics. He also showed off the GoGlove, a bluetooth glove and talked about the Apple Watch and other wearables they are experimenting with.

worth a watch – just 5 minutes long and Barrie is quite a showman. Not to shortchange the others on the stage – Jason Blessing and Jerry Foster of Plex and Scott Tollafield of Fisher were excellent in their own way. I had a chance to interact with them at the event.

 

 

Google Project Soli

On its surface, the idea behind Soli is similar to Leap Motion and other gesture-based controllers: A sensor tracks the movements of your hands, which control the input into a device. During a demo at the session Friday, Soli's founder, Ivan Poupyrev, showed how the sensor could recognize gestures and allow people to control functions of a smartwatch without touching a display.

But unlike other motion controllers, which depend on cameras, Soli is equipped with radar, which helps it "track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy," ATAP says. This helps keep Soli tiny — small enough to fit within a tiny chip that can be incorporated into wearables and other devices.

Mashable

 

 

Re-imagineering Disney World

Excellent article in FastCompany on Disney’s ambitious tech enabled tinkering of the UX at its flagship park in Orlando

“While most observers view Disney’s parks as kingdoms of escapism, Neal Gabler, in his definitive biography of Walt Disney, argues that their success actually derives from "crafting a better reality than the one outside," with a reassuring "control and order" where all is "harmonious." But in the ensuing weeks, working from a trailer behind Epcot, the founding five started digging into the problems that made the reality of Disney World something less than "harmonious." There were the endless lines for rides, food, and bathrooms; parents juggling maps, hotel keys, baby carriages, and bottles of SPF 75; and kids pulling families on long treks to try to visit every attraction. The park was filled with complications, such as a tiered ticketing system with wonky rules.

Given Disney World’s ticket prices, families felt obligated to "divide and conquer," says MacPhee. The team created diagrams illustrating how families, seeking to maximize their time, would crisscross Cinderella Castle, the center of the park, as often as 20 times a day. Worse yet: the swarms of people. On average, 8,000 to 10,000 guests flow through the park’s main entrance every hour. "On the surface, we had super happy guests, but in reality, we were making them go through so much hassle at the park that down the road, they would simply say, 'No más!' " says one former longtime Disney manager. As MacPhee, who has the look of a Division II offensive coordinator, admits, Disney World was on the verge of becoming "dangerously complex and transactional." The team soon presented its ideas to Rasulo. He gave them the go-ahead to rethink everything, including turnstile entrances and paper ticketing. That’s when the project got its code name, Next Generation Experience, or NGE. The founding five soon found themselves on a perpetual shuttle between Burbank and Orlando.”

“Edge Corp” manufacturing evolves

Plex Systems gave several analysts a walk through of the simulated shop floor at their HQ. It was nice to see how the facility has evolved since last year even as hand held scanners, light curtains and digital calipers continue to be used. 

There are considerably more displays – a Macro one to show various manufacturing steps across locations, and another to show progress within a facility

There are several more mobile devices, wearables and sensors on the floor includin

Ruggedized Google Glass with safety shield

Ring scanner – a Honeywell 8650 Bluetooth version

Beacon from Estimote

Next year, I expect to see Apple Watch and some robotics in addition.

The factory has also shrunk in floor space – a sign of a significant productivity improvement!

Wearable technology trends from CES

Good friend Troy Angrignon has an excellent analysis and a large photo gallery of wearable technology he saw in Vegas at CES in January.

Troy, who describes himself as Entrepreneur, Athlete, Adventurer, brings the credibility  of having watched these devices evolve over years and  the field testing he does with the very athletic lifestyle he leads

“Some patterns clearly emerged in the wearable sector, which I’ll outline below in more detail. But in short, here they are:

• seven markets are clearly colliding;
• customer segmentation and use cases are becoming more mature;
• it’s not about the fight for the wrist anymore;
• entire product portfolios are emerging from established players;
• some cool new tech is coming, like sensor kits that stick on like bandages;
• and the basic wearable (a band or watch with 3d sensor) has commoditized.”

Rings as wearable tech

Like many professional women, Christina Mercando keeps her smartphone in her purse, which meant she was constantly digging it out to check for important notifications. But what if she could get that info from something she was already wearing, much as pants-wearing men can feel a phone buzz in their pocket? That’s the thinking behind Ringly, a line of rings that can be programmed to glow when wearers get an email from their boss, a text from their Uber driver or any number of other can’t-miss communications. Mercando, a former product and design manager at eBay, raised more than $1 million to realize her vision. So far, the concept is working: the first 1,000 Ringly rings, which debuted in June, sold out within 24 hours.

Time

 

Blue Collar Wearables

That’s why Perko is building a central command center to preserve his company’s institutional knowledge. The idea? Assemble that brain trust of gray-haired experts to help, with the aid of technology, less experienced employees in the field. The younger workers wear special safety glasses equipped with a camera, microphone, speaker, detachable flash drive, and wireless antenna. Through a Bluetooth connection to their phone, the fieldworkers transmit a live video feed of their actions back to the command center. A veteran watches and gives further instruction.

The “smart” safety glasses, made by a Nashville startup called XOEye Technologies, are a “game-changer,” Perko says. Problems get fixed faster, the younger workers learn faster, and reports can be sent to clients to verify that a job has been completed. Pleased with the results of a pilot, Perko plans to expand his use of the $499 glasses and potentially put them on the faces of 300 of his 800 employees.

Fortune

 

Microsoft Health

The Microsoft Health platform includes a cloud service for consumers and the industry to store and combine health and fitness data to create powerful insights. Microsoft Health will be available for consumers from the new Microsoft Health app which launches today on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Also launching today is the Microsoft Band, a smart band designed for Microsoft Health, for people who want to live healthier and be more productive.

First, let’s talk about how Microsoft Health will make tracking personal fitness easier, more insightful and more holistic. Microsoft Health will unite data from different health and fitness devices and services in a single, secure location. Once stored in Microsoft Health, you can combine the data you generate from different devices and services – steps, calories, heart rate and more –  to receive powerful insights from our Intelligence Engine.

The Official Microsoft Blog

As well as being a fitness tracker, the band enables wearers to see their emails, calendar, texts, social media updates and other push notifications on their wrist – photo credit Daily Mail

Wearable Cameras

Like Google or Xerox, “GoPro” is one of those branded proper nouns that has been so successful that it has become a verb. With 6,000 or more new tagged videos uploaded to YouTube each day, GoPro-ing is now a legitimate phenomenon. The cameras are sturdy, cheap and small enough to sit in the palm of your hand; they can be attached to almost anything, from a surfboard to a tripod to a recalcitrant labrador. They are easy to use and produce remarkably high-quality video, which you can post online right away. To Hennessy’s disappointment, though, that formula was not enough to gain the pair’s films any online traction.

The Guardian

The New GoPro Hero 4 video

 

Sports Science at Seattle Sounders

Sports science is becoming increasingly sophisticated. AtSeattle Sounders FC, (an MLS team) David Tenney the team’s fitness coach explains how its use of wearable technology, GPS data and data from triangulated video shoots are used to build fitness profiles that are visualized in Tableau and then used to optimize training and fitness plans for the star players.

Diginomica

Photo Credit - click to enlarge