Covid-19 may be gone, but remote working is here to stay.
Upwork reports that 32.6 million Americans will work remotely by 2025.
Recent research has even shown that remote working promotes productivity.
But, what if you can double your employees’ productivity and bring your business to further heights?
Enter Augmented Reality (AR), a transformative technology that overlays digital content on the physical environment, increasing connectivity across virtual spaces.
If identified and developed well, AR in remote collaboration can not only boost productivity but also streamline employee training.’
That’s why, going with the right AR app development company is essential to ensure a smooth implementation of the tech.
So, if you are excited about the development of AR, read on and see how your company can leverage it for success.
What Is Collaborative Augmented Reality?
More and more workplaces are adopting the hybrid work model, while some are still going fully remote.
Additionally, companies are three times more willing to hire remote workers globally.
International recruiting can help reduce employment expenses and scale to high-potential markets.
Thanks to the advancement of AR, people’s working locations will no longer be an issue.
AR provides a collaborative augmented reality that fosters synergy across teams, departments, and management.
Yet, many businesses are still unsure about the implementation of AR in remote working due to the setup complexities or high cost.
The initial cost of AR may be significant, but the return on investment in the long run is promising.
Moreover, a survey from IDC says AR brings a range of benefits for companies who have rolled out the tech.
43% of companies say AR is helpful for remote support, 39% for employee training, and 33% for knowledge retention.
What Are the Benefits of AR in Remote Collaboration?
We have touched on some advantages of adopting AR in remote collaboration, but there are more:
- Real-time collaboration: AR bridges the connection between employees anywhere in the world. It can also enable a collaborative environment for a group of people – which comes in especially handy for training.
- Save transportation costs: Employers need to cover travel costs for employees for certain purposes. The pricing for airplane, water, or road transportation has also experienced quite a surge recently.
With AR, you can save up on travel expenses, and collaborate remotely as effectively as you would in an offline setting.
- Save training costs: Hiring a professional trainer or an expert could be costly.
Thankfully, with AR, you can use this available resource to onboard new employees and train the old ones.
Human errors will gradually decrease the more employees receive proper training with AR.
- Streamline communications: AR remote tools allow for interactive collaboration between employees, companies, and suppliers wherever they are.
- Boost productivity.
A downtime in operations can result in a loss as huge as $50 billion per year.
Thankfully, the full suite of AR collaboration tools can sustain productivity. A mix of AI, machine learning, and AI can easily detect performance blockers so companies can take preventive measures beforehand.
- Improve recruitment processes: AR enables talent acquisition to recruit candidates from any side of the world.
- Reduce professional training costs: Hiring a professional trainer or an expert could be costly.
For a cost-efficient alternative, you can leverage AR-powered materials for periodical training.
- Increase documentation transparency: Using AR collaboration tools, you can record any meeting, training, or interaction sessions along with the annotations or discussions.
Features of AR in Remote Collaboration
So, how can AR really foster remote collaboration?
A lot of ways, and let’s find them out by understanding the following features:
- Live text scan – AR comes with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology that can help technicians and professionals identify product labels, instruction manuals, and warning labels accurately.
- Live camera and streaming – This comes in handy for long-distance supervision. If you send out a technician for a repair and you’d like to help solve an issue, leverage AR to connect to their smartphone or smart glasses and access. This way, you can access what your technician sees, and solve the problem faster.
- Note-taking and recording – Thanks to AR, you can multitask seamlessly between taking notes and recording the session without having to switch apps.
- Centralized file management – Numerous collaborations happen each day in an organization, to the point when it’s hard to keep track of all the information. AR can be your source of truth to store all your notes and documents. Anyone who needs the file in the future can quickly search for it with a click.
- Spatial cues support – Make your training sessions more immersive with 2D and 3D annotations.
- Multi-device support – AR provides a digital tool kit complete with a technician console that can support multiple devices at once.
- Freeze camera stream feature – Let’s say you’re troubleshooting an error and you want to freeze the screen to get a closer look and a better picture of the issue. AR camera will be the perfect solution for this.
If you are interested in adopting the features above for better productivity, our team of tech experts is here to help.
AR in Remote Collaboration Across Industries
The implementation of AR across industries is vast – from eCommerce and retail to manufacturing and education.
Let’s get into the details.
Manufacturing
On-site industries that involve heavy lifting, such as oil rigs, power plants, or factories – especially those in remote locations – will heavily benefit from AR.
Some jobs are so technical that they require expert assistance.
Yet, calling out an expert will result in additional costs and waste more time.
With AR in manufacturing, front-line workers can focus on productivity and do a live-streaming session with the experts.
AR support can help you with complex tasks such as repairing machines and equipment.
It can also help identify issues and opportunities for improvement via annotations, which comes in handy in a quality assurance (QA) procedure.
As a result, you can prevent any problem that might impact your financial performance.
In manufacturing, AR is also popularly used for training new members with digital work instructions.
Construction
AR enables architects and engineers to visualize, plan, and execute the infrastructure they build in a more defined way.
Further, AR can be used to promote more safety practices in construction sites.
Real-time information sharing also allows for efficient communications when technical problems arise.
Plus, AR can help create the design visualization of a building.
Potential investors can gain some insights and in turn, you can easily manage some risks and get the funding you need.
Education
Remote learning has become the norm for all levels of education.
To facilitate remote learning, AR in education can launch a virtual classroom where tutors can engage students’ attention with interactive 3D features.
Not to mention, AR comes with gamification that will make learning much more enjoyable.
To improve students’ comprehension, AR-powered annotations can be leveraged to add explanations to a text, detail, or diagram.
Conclusion
All in all, AR will revolutionize remote working.
The technology is set to help companies achieve peak productivity and a return on investment (ROI) on their operations.
If you are ready to bring AR in remote working, Intelivita is here to build you a robust collaborative tool to take your business to new heights.
