Build an Augmented Reality Strategy for your Business

Trace the four eras of enterprise—from agrarian and industrial to information and the smart connected era—through revolutions shaping people, products, and processes.

Discover how augmented reality brings real business value to the enterprise through design reviews, work instructions, remote service, and training, with holograms and dashboards powering the smart connected era.

Explore the AR playbook to map enterprise AR options, tradeoffs, and technologies across strategy, content, and delivery, guided by 15 key framing questions on content sources, live vs cached, localization.

Explore augmented reality playbook use cases, including consumer furniture holograms and cloud-delivered content on mobile devices, with surface detection, object recognition, and interactive holograms for maintenance and remote guidance.

Define the AR strategy by examining reality type, end-user capabilities, supported devices and platforms, and the development approach to deliver the experience, with practical insights.

Explore reality options for business solutions by comparing augmented reality, virtual reality, and assisted reality, and decide when to apply each in context.

Explore AR capabilities such as visualize, instructions, guidance, interact, sense, recognize, and program, and leverage sight, sound, and simulated touch to deliver IoT‑driven AR experiences.

Evaluate devices and platforms for AR, from phones and tablets to head-mounted displays, and adopt a cross-platform content strategy that separates software from hardware.

Explore strategies for developing AR experiences, from custom-coded apps to 3D web authoring platforms. Learn how capture and ad hoc collaboration enable scalable training and remote expert guidance.

The strategy section sets product direction for your AR solution and defines the end-user experience, while detailing the hardware, software technology, and development or authoring approach to deliver enterprise experiences.

Explore how to represent, create, manage, and map content into the real world using a 3D framework, including sourcing information and configuration management for dynamic data.

Develop a 3D reference of the real world to anchor AR content using surfaces, image markers, and 3D models, enhanced by photogrammetry, with attention to drift and precision.

Identify content formats and sources for AR, manage dynamic content, and leverage IT data, IoT, AI-driven simulations, 3D holograms, haptics, and human input to enrich experiences.

Separate content from code with a content management server to deliver the right versions at runtime, enabling scalable AR through PLM, BIM, and 3D CAD data.

Map the content formats, sources, and configuration management to a 3D digital understanding of the physical world, and scope information assets, systems, and integration points to deliver AR experiences.

Explore the delivery section of the AR playbook, examining runtime behavior, launching experiences, loading digital content, syncing data from the cloud to AR devices, and gathering user feedback.

Explore initialization strategies for augmented reality experiences, comparing hardcoded apps with general purpose apps that load context-specific content via markers, near-field cues, or sensor fusion.

Place the user in the environment to determine where AR content appears, using GPS, beacons, image markers, object and terrain recognition, sensor fusion, and AI for spatial or object AR.

Explore transport strategies in the AR framework, balancing cached content, on-the-fly downloads, and streaming to match data size and update frequency.

Explore how AR feedback enables user input through touch, voice, gestures, and eye tracking, expanding from simple controls to hands-free and IoT sensor–driven spatial interfaces.

Explore runtime considerations and strategic questions with the AR Playbook framework to plan new solutions and rethink existing ones for head-mounted devices and emerging AR developments.

Howden uses an augmented reality virtual human machine interface to deliver real-time diagnostics, product specs, and collaborative expert service calls, differentiating its blowers and reducing downtime.

Discover how Howden uses augmented reality to wrap a blower system in a digital, interactive experience via HoloLens with 2D data, 3D geometries, and interactive UI controls.

Demonstrates how BAE Systems uses AR with HoloLens for just-in-time, in-context, step-by-step assembly training, slashing training time by 30% and assembly time by 50% with zero defects.

Showcases BAE using AR work instructions on the HoloLens to guide new workers with hands-free, 3D content mapped to the workspace. Uses template-based authoring with CAD-derived holograms and PLM content.

Augmented reality adds value to CAD data across engineering, manufacturing, and field service by visualizing 3D models, digital twins, and IoT data.

Explore how augmented reality extends the internet's reach by bringing digital information into the physical world, enabling humans to participate in the IoT-enabled, smart, connected enterprise.