There’s been a lot of speculation about who’s going to win in the consumer and industrial markets: Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality?

Apparently a heavyweight has weighed in on this already – Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has said that augmented reality makes much more sense as a commercial tool, especially in the industrial and engineering spaces. The word is that Apple is stocking up on VR and AR experts – if the owner of the Silicon Valley doughnut (or spaceship, as some have called the new HQ) is doing this, you can bet that other blue-chip tech companies are jumping on that bandwagon, too.

At Peaxy we are developing our own AR visualization tools, but they are focused on a particular use case(s) that the Apples of the world may overlook. Companies working with heavy equipment in the field – wind farm companies, power utilities, turbine makers, and the aviation and aerospace industry, among others – understand that AR is more than a toy. It’s a tool that can visualize data in a collaborative environment like we’ve never been able to do before. In our ideal world five years from now, engineering teams at a single company in three different locations will be able to don special AR lenses and all look at a 3D rendering of a gearbox failure report (with the gearbox itself floating in the room!) at the same time over the Web.

This scenario is not science fiction… it’s something we are working on today in the Peaxy labs. The Peaxy Visualization Suite is only the first stab at bringing AR technologies to the Industrial Internet and IoT solutions. Creating visual cues based on performance or testcell data (or, better yet, a comparison of those two data sets) to engineers will be an invaluable tool for design optimization, anomaly detection alerts, warranty analytics, condition-based maintenance plans and a host of other applications.

So follow Mr. Cook down the yellow brick road to AR land, we’ll be right there next to you!