Vuforia Chalk – The solution to the collaboration challenges we face within 3d design
With people’s movement being heavily restricted all around the globe Vuforia Chalk can help you with remote assistance. How can you keep things moving? Do you support your team and how does your team support you to get practical things done and keep critical equipment and processes running? How can you support the one person that is close enough to the problem, to actually get there, hands on and to fix it? Would it be an office worker, a factory worker, a field technician, a partner, a customer or yourself?
With current restrictions that force people to work mostly from home and only move around within their immediate surroundings, puts completely new challenges on any organization to just function.
Embracing emerging technologies like AR and VR has been challenging to many organizations. To many, the technologies seem like something that is just ‘nice to have’ and many question, where is the real value, how does this fit our organization, do we have the necessary supporting processes, how do we train people to change and adapt?
But what to do in this serious and exceptional time when we are forced to act and think differently?
Remote guidance and assistance can be a short-term solution, for helping people and organization’s in getting things done remotely without the need for new complex processes, advanced connections to business systems and new tool-chains that require ramp up time and training. Remote guidance and assistance require a minimum of two persons to solve the problem. For many cases, this might be good enough, or the only option, in this unprecedented time that we are all in for an unknown time ahead.
Vuforia Chalk – Augmented Reality, simple and secure remote guidance and assistance – for businesses
PTC in cooperation with PDSVISION invites you to use Vuforia Chalk for free without any obligations. This is a joint effort that we believe will help.
This provides a chance for you to support your colleagues, customers and your business through this quite simple and exciting tool.
Chalk allows your experts to securely connect and collaborate with anyone, internally and externally, in order to support, assist and get work done remotely.
All of this is enabled through the mobile App available for iOS and Android. A new feature is also Chalk for desktop. This means that Chalk calls can be initiated and/or received directly through the browser on your PC workstation.
Getting work done remotely is simply calling your expert with the Chalk App. During the call the expert can then draw and annotate ‘sticky notes’ with their own hands directly in your live camera view. Chalk has a low bandwidth mode that turns the video stream to an image stream, this allows you to continue working, even in networks under 500 Kbps.
Vuforia Chalk is a tool for businesses, so it contains a function, from where you add, delete and control the users, this is the Business Admin Centre. The Admin Centre also gives you access to dashboard insights and analytics about the use as well as control of system settings.
The expert in the home office, can see the shared camera view from the person requiring assistance. The expert can then draw by hand, directly in the live camera feed. These drawings will stick to the environment so that the person in the field can easily see and understand what to do next.
The person in the field, requiring assistance, can also draw in the same view with their own desired and distinguished color. Voice is also transferred during the call to further enhance the collaboration possibilities. After the session, an image sequence of all phases of the call is generated. This sequence can be stored for reporting purposes. Both persons will have the image sequence generated on their respective devices.
We are here to help and assist you short and long term
Chalk was originally developed for those needing a flexible AR communication and remote support tool. But in reality, it is able to bring together industry experts and even your customers with the ability to communicate and collaborate – simply, securely, and ‘visually’, without complex training or learning curves.
It is focused towards being a tool that can be utilized to overcome daily project and work challenges, all without the impact of geography and remoteness slowing down the workflow towards resolution. Chalk is more than just a toy for technology enthusiasts, instead allowing company experts to empower individuals onsite to be the experts for the task at hand anywhere and any time.
One comment I got during a Chalk demonstration was “this is so simple it could actually work”.
Functional & Practical Adoption
Combining the latest AR technology with the ability to quickly draw and annotate ‘sticky notes’, Chalk helps to solve the problem faster than any standardized meeting tools.
It is in my mind a faster rout to solving problems here and now compared to AR design collaboration which requires more complex process development, automation and integration. All before it will start generating value and provide scalability.
Chalk is a true SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution that stands on its own and that can help here and now, in many of the current day-to-day challenges we face! By solving the day-to-day problems quicker, it allows you to put greater efforts on building the processes of tomorrow, allowing the system to be smart enough to assist the single worker in the field through connected and up-to-date visual AR/VR/3D instructions.
Your team will also find a range of practical and usable applications that make it a realistic and adoptive technology for the long term.
Both expert and technician can accurately mark-up live views to highlight details or guide multi-step solutions, reducing potentially costly mistakes or simply solving necessary steps in order to guarantee service and business continuity. It can be utilized to provide an overview of real-time live collaborations, complete with Images annotations, and voice – it is easy to understand ‘sticky’ graphics supported by 3D environment mapping in the AR age.
Basic everyday tasks work seamlessly as they should but with ability to integrate into your current organizations established workflows. Attaching Chalk session overviews to work orders as evidence of service for example, not only streamlines and shortens a process from inception to invoicing, but builds trust.
Your customer can visualize and see evidence of the work you claim for. This can provide an improved QC processes with the ability to go back and thoroughly investigate, identify potential flaws in close detail when the reality is that you are psychically remote and speeding the issues towards a successful resolution.
Fluid Compatibility as Expected Today
True and fluid iOS and Android compatibility is now an industry expectation – Chalk delivers and delivers equal compatibility and true functionality as expected. Adding the recently released desktop browser functionality reassuring to know this before you even start. Being compatible is one thing, actually being functional is the enterprise need!
Functionality across platforms allows universal roll out across territories, often in countries with differing standards and accessibility to the hardware required and high variation in bandwidth speed.
To deal with these bottle necks, Chalk is equipped with a simple to configure “Bandwidth Mode” that can accommodate the hungry demands for streaming video, as you can smoothly switch between video stream and image stream.
Assured enterprise grade Security
Understandable and increasing concerns towards 3rd party applications and security are rising to the top of business strategies and people’s considerations.
Vuforia’s system is proven, viable and available, it is designed for enterprise – Secure communication is factored from inception and has been implemented from the core – aligned to the needs of industry Authentication Standards / SSO.
This is no small detail – The recent disruptions to society has led to poor choices with long term impacts due to the pressure for us to get on and get networking on “The Fly”. It opens the potential for malicious software to enter into the equation – Our usual due diligence often brushed aside in the haste to just function. I do find myself considering the problems poor choices will be revealed.
Easy Management & Implementation
Any collaboration tool needs to be administered from initial installation to adoption and user allocation. A task not considered fun, and one we all try to avoid, especially in the serious and uncertain times we are in now .
Chalk provides simple installation, roll out and admin management via its Centralized user management and work-group analytics system. It can provide easy to source data on a range of subject equations to help improve efficiency and reduce operational costs in both short and long term. Put simply, it can be the differentiation to getting work done, allowing operation and service continuity.
PTC also promise to continue developing the Chalk product and related service with new functions and features that is easy to recognize, adapt and take advantage of.
Complete Support and Training
Any software installation requires some level of support, even if installed by an expert user. It can be a simple Q&A resource portal for some, or a human technical expert for others.
Direction to overcome a tired and forgetful mind to instructor lead certified courses , we tailor our user training around the needs of the end user – They are always the best guide what is required regardless of how simple things are to us, the experts.
PTC Vuforia underpin their product family with a support network that includes partners like ourselves here at PDSVISION. We specialise in the implementation, compatibility and adoption of the Vuforia suite as part of our Digital Transformation portfolio of solutions.
PDSVISION assist organizations from initial consultation to full roll out and implementation, with a support structure that extends globally. We employ AR specialists who know the products, but also know how to scale the solution to the needs and size of the your business – Small teams of designers to large branded manufacturers, all have unique requirements that we can adapt these solutions to fit, automate and scale accordingly. We can help further by demonstrating the key benefits and know how to get you using them yourselves, quickly and without stressful learning curves.
PDSVISION has been instrumental in helping many organizations, in partnership with PTC, to overcome their own individual challenges in adoption, to try the software and see that new methods and this newer way of working for themselves, first-hand and eliminated risk.
Free Until Last of June 2020*
To encourage you to try this solution within your own organization, today, at a time when an applications like Vuforia Chalk can help overcome global disruption, we along with others in our sector have agreed to offer Vuforia Chalk FREE until at least end of August 2020.
We strike out those short term costs, so you can focus on the benefits it will demonstrate in the way that is best – letting you play with it and letting you establish its benefits whilst it actually benefiting you in reality.
I really encourage you to then compare it against other solutions you have tried, or those whose offers need exploring before you can even try it – I am confident Chalk will demonstrate to you that it supports, it collaborates efficiently, and it delivers fast, efficient real-time results that benefit you today, firming up those long term foundations in the process.
Best regards
Pontus Blomberg
