Industrial and enterprise augmented reality outfit Upskill today announced that the company has closed a $17.2 million funding round that brings on new strategic investors such as Accenture PLC and Cisco Investments.

Upskill is the developer of a platform called Skylight AR, a software suite designed to power smart glasses in industrial and enterprise settings. Introduced in 2012 and upgraded to its current version in October, Skylight AR integrates quickly with almost any environment with self-service AR workflow creation and data integration services.

Smart glasses are used in industrial settings as a way to allow workers to access information related to their jobs more rapidly without needing to carry bulky manuals or extra reference materials. With AR, a welder can see weld lines projected right into their visual field and a warehouse worker would receive visible guidance to a shelf where an item would be retrieved from and then directions for where to place it.

With this investment in Upskill, management consulting firm Accenture intends to use this newly formed alliance to integrate AR platforms into its own workflows. Accenture will begin using Upskill’s Skylight AR with the Accenture Digital Distribution Solution, a digital content platform that enables the distribution of any type of content to any device at scale.

Accenture provides AR and connected worker solutions capabilities within the Accenture Industry X.0 and Accenture Extended Reality groups. These two groups within the company attempt to combine innovative technologies – including AR and other connected technologies – to traditional workflows.

“Extended reality solutions are eliminating the distance between people and information,” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology and innovation officer. “In the case of connected industrial workers, it can empower them to radically improve productivity and performance while increasing safety.”

As part of its initiatives to introduce new technologies, Accenture provides industrial workers with access to AR and virtual reality, 3-D models, artificial intelligence-based image recognition and analytics via wearable devices such as smart glasses, tablets and smartphones.

Multinational aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co., a current investor in Upskill, uses the AR platform to build aircraft more efficiently by allowing workers to see wiring while they are installing it. According to Boeing, the adoption of AR technology on the manufacturing floor has cut production time by 25 percent and errors to nearly zero.

“We are ramping up our use of Skylight and wearables inside our operations,” said Ted Colbert, chief information officer at Boeing. “[We are] seeing multiple aircraft manufacturing lines benefit from the solution, and we now want to introduce AR into the services part of our business so we may service our own, and third-party products, for our end-customers.”

The next few years may be instrumental for the AR industry, as noted by Gartner analysts who predicted that by 2020, augmented reality solutions will be adopted across multiple business functions in 30 percent of large enterprises as part of their digital transformation.

“Wearables are emerging as a new category of ‘things’ enabling real-time worker connectivity and collaboration in industrial environments,” said Rob Salvagno, head of corporate development at Cisco Investments. Salvagno cited efficiency and safety as major factors for the use of AR in the workplace. “Adoption of AR-enabled smart glasses, in particular, has reached an inflection point.”

ABI Research also weighed in on AR use at industrial campuses as seeing significant growth with a survey in which 42 percent of 455 U.S.-based companies responded that smart glasses are currently part of workflows and 54 percent are currently looking at integrating them.

“Wearable devices are clearly becoming more popular in many organizations, with the manufacturing industry being one of the more aggressive verticals,” said Stephanie Lawrence, research analyst at ABI Research. “We expect the manufacturing industry to see high wearable device shipment numbers over the next five years, reaching 32 million shipments in 2022.”

Image: Upskill