Ethar Awarded NSF STTR Grant to Revolutionize Manufacturing with AR

by Robert Labelle | May 8, 2024 | Announcement, News, Partnerships, Press Release

Ethar Awarded NSF STTR Grant to Revolutionize Manufacturing with AR

Ethar and Alfred University Awarded NSF STTR Grant to Revolutionize Manufacturing with AR

Ethar, Inc. (ethar.com), is proud to announce that the company, in collaboration with academic partner Alfred University (alfred.edu), have been awarded a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).The scope of work involves development of Ethar’s proprietary, semantically-aware augmented reality solution for manufacturing environments.

This grant will enable the Ethar team to continue building groundbreaking intelligent augmented reality (AR) solutions that merge innovations in structured data and location-based spatial computing to address two critical challenges: worker efficiency and workplace safety. The initial project is aimed at the manufacturing sector and the solution will later be broadly applicable across many market verticals.

During the one-year project, the Ethar team will develop a proof-of-concept demonstration in Alfred University’s Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology. That system will predictively provide factory personnel with location-based AR-enabled work instructions and digital safety warnings blended into their physical 3D workspace.

Additionally, the Ethar team will develop a foundational, open-specification Reality Modeling Language (RML) to extend current geospatial models and describe 3D spatial reality in a more usable way. Multiple international standards organizations provided letters of support for Ethar’s project and are anticipating ways RML could accelerate value-generation in AR solutions.

“The open RML will unlock a world that’s knowable, searchable, and enriched with data, empowering users and applications to empower the entire AR ecosystem.” stated Tony Hodgson, Ethar CEO. “Context-aware AR applications will pave the way for seamless interaction between people, places, and things, ultimately realizing the full potential of AR to support digital twins and smart factories – critical elements for U.S. global competitiveness, economic growth, and national defense.”

Ethar, Inc. is helping clients unlock new dimensions of customer engagement through augmented reality. Our inspired team is pursuing a portfolio of projects leveraging our intelligent spatial web platform and making AR easy, accessible, and affordable. Stay tuned for further updates on this, and other, exciting projects as Ethar welcomes the next era of communication.

#Ethar #AlfredUniversity #NSF #STTRGrant #Manufacturing #AR #Innovation #Safety #Efficiency

ETHAR Demonstrates Building Energy Monitor

by ETHAR | Jan 16, 2023 | Press Release

ETHAR Demonstrates Building Energy Monitor

Ethar showcases the use of AR and XR tools with Open Geospatial Consortium Standards

HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA 16 January 2023 – Ethar, which provides a comprehensive platform that brings the full potential of XR experiences to developers, brands and users, announced today that it will be presenting its contribution to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Testbed-18 on 17 January during the virtual OGC Testbed-18 Demonstration Days.

OGC Testbed-18 is an initiative to explore six tasks, including advanced Interoperability for Building Energy; Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs, Identifiers for Reproducible Science, Moving Features and Sensor Integration, 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming, and Machine Learning Training Data.

For OGC Testbed-18, Ethar created a building energy monitoring application driven by OGC data compliant sources which displayed building energy data using 3D and extended reality (XR) techniques.

In 2022 National Resources of Canada desired a way to quickly identify buildings with abnormal high energy usage in order to target these in mitigation efforts. Ethar’s effort in the Testbed-18 was to make this possible by pulling live energy utilization data from buildings in the Montreal area, and map those to the 3D buildings placed on top of the street maps using OGC data standards. To achieve this, Ethar created an application to pull in data from other participants in Testbed-18 and allowed participants to select from five different energy utilization metrics. The power of the application is the ability to filter buildings by any of the parameters of the five metrics. Ethar’s contribution to OGC Testbed-18 is the illustration of how current 3D and XR tools can be used to consume OGC data streams.

“It was an honor to have worked alongside participants in the OGC Testbed-18 initiative and to realize an application for a core area of the Testbed,” said Tony Hodgson, CEO of Ethar. “ The use of AR and XR have tremendous benefits for industry and humanity alike, and being able to demonstrate how the use of such tools combined with OGC standards can positively impact high energy usage mitigation efforts is paramount to the adoption and broad use of the technologies.”

The video of Ethar’s demonstration is on Youtube. OGC Testbed-18 Demonstration Days is a public event and is open for registration.

About Ethar

Ethar’s mission is to empower people, brands and organizations with the power and benefits of AR and other immersive technologies. Ethar is passionate about how it can make a difference in the world for end users, independent creators and developers to small businesses and medium and large enterprises across industries. Ethar is built by world-leading experts who have worked for some of the world’s biggest and successful companies and organizations and a wide range of small businesses.