Inpixon, Ostendo Reimagine Hybrid Workplace with Wearable Augmented Reality Display Glasses

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Inpixon, the Indoor Intelligence™ company, announced it has executed a strategic alliance and co-marketing agreement with Ostendo Technologies, Inc., a leader in quantum photonics and micro-display technologies. In connection with this agreement, the companies will jointly pursue customer opportunities aimed at launching new augmented reality (AR) enabled solutions incorporating Ostendo's AR smart glasses and Inpixon's award-winning location, computer vision and AR technologies. These solutions will seek to surpass competitors' benchmarks in terms of size, weight, resolution, cost-effectiveness and mobile app integration in order to bring the immersive experiences and extraordinary value of AR to a multitude of industries and use cases.

Nadir Ali, CEO of Inpixon, commented, "This strategic alliance with Ostendo will enable us to leverage our range of capabilities and technologies, including app development, mapping, AR, sports devices and others in order to reimagine the hybrid workplace experience. With Ostendo's collaboration, we believe we can introduce new products to accelerate the next revolution in immersive experiences. Unlike the recently announced Facebook Horizon Workroom that endeavors for remote workers to collaborate in virtual reality, Inpixon's hybrid workplace experience coupled with Ostendo's truly wearable AR smart glasses will help organizations enhance the IRL (in-real-life) experience and performance of its employees based on their location, whether at home, in the workplace or in between. The possibilities are nearly limitless, and we're eager to pursue these opportunities in the disruptive, rapidly growing AR and wearable market."

Inpixon and Ostendo will seek to combine their technological capabilities for application across various use cases. Wearable displays that incorporate Inpixon mapping, positioning and IoT device tracking can be used to make routine facilities and equipment inspections or maintenance actions more efficient by delivering data such as routing guidance, assessment checklists, image capture, and problem reporting.  With the aid of wearable displays, emergency care workers can receive alerts and optimized routing guidance to the person in need of care, and when a situation exceeds the current knowledge of the caregiver, wearable displays can enable effective telemedicine and deliver step-by-step guidance to the responder. In addition to work environments, wearable displays can also be leveraged in sports by bringing a hands-free augmentation to the game. As an example, the golf experience can be transformed with heads-up, hands-free visualization of on-course analytics, ball finding, distance to go, weather, club selection, score tracking, and more.

Ostendo CEO and co-founder, Dr. Hussein S. El-Ghoroury, a pioneer in the mobile and telecom industries and the former CTO of IBM Microelectronics, said, "Ostendo's Quantum Photonic Imager (QPI®) solves the wearability problem for smart glasses where cost, weight and brightness relegated existing heads-up displays to niche applications. Many augmented reality experiences depend on an accurate understanding of where we are and what's around us, which is why we are thrilled to partner with Inpixon, the leading indoor intelligence company. Together we will offer best-in-class wearable displays that extend Inpixon's ability to deliver actionable intelligence on top of its market-leading suite of hardware and software technologies for AR, computer vision, 3D construction, data science, mapping and app development."

Ostendo's QPI® is the only full-color ? 10µm µLED micro display in the market that can enable the immersive and volumetric aspects needed to realize both wearable near-eye displays and holographic light field displays. One of many practical implementations of QPI® is for augmented reality smart glasses. Unlike legacy technologies, the QPI® fully-integrates multiple existing functions (i.e., display, optical collimator, image processor and decompression code), which reduces size and cost and enables the transition from a mobile computing (smartphone and tablet) to a wearable computing platform with market-leading specs that wirelessly connect to any smartphone, tablet, PC, game box, or media streaming device. Ostendo boasts a portfolio of more than 400 patents, and its backers and funding sources have included luxury fashion titan and investor François-Henri Pinault and the US Government's DARPA and IARPA programs who turned to Ostendo to develop 3D holographic displays.

"Our collaboration with Ostendo will drive the digital transformation initiatives of our mutual clients and an expansive pipeline of new, marque customers and governments with what we believe to be the most advanced augmented reality technology available globally coupled with our full-stack of indoor intelligence solutions. Together, we will work collaboratively with these clients to co-create unique applications that will materialize the art of the possible in a value-driven, organizational adoption at a rapid pace," said Adam Benson, CTO of Inpixon. "We are excited to have the Inpixon and Ostendo development teams work closely together to architect a new era in augmented reality with Ostendo's hardware, chipset and our technologies around app development, mapping, positioning, sports devices, and more."

"Ostendo welcomes Inpixon and its clients to the photonic era, and we are ready to deliver a transformational visual computing experience through wearable displays with up to a 150-degree diagonal field of view, matched to harness QPI® Advanced Architecture and our vuOS™ Visual Access Operating System, incorporating Inpixon's Indoor Intelligence™ location-based systems and software," said Dr. Chih-Li Chuang, SVP, Engineering and Technology of Ostendo. "Enabling employees and others to achieve new levels of productivity with a concurrent visual interface that allows for context switching based on visual or user-selected prompts that understands the user's environment enhanced by Inpixon's technologies is pioneering; today is one for the history books."

Augmented reality is poised for extraordinary growth according to research studies and industry experts. The Harvard Business Review article, Why Every Organization Needs an Augmented Reality Strategy, refers to AR as "a historic innovation," and states, "AR will become the new interface between humans and machines...AR will affect companies in every industry." And it's already happening, as noted in another HBR publication, Augmented Reality Is Already Improving Worker Performance: "Upskilling technologies, a partnership between humans and smart machines, can augment workers' abilities, resulting in dramatically improved performance, greater safety, and higher worker satisfaction." The authors cite studies of GE Healthcare, Boeing and others showing an average productivity improvement of 32%. Notably, the benefits extend beyond productivity to experiences, stated a IEEE study: "The future mobile augmented reality applications will bring an added value to numerous application domains by enhancing the quality of user experience and well-being of the sophisticated next generation society." Thus, it's no surprise market researchers are forecasting extraordinary growth for the global augmented reality market of 46.6% CAGR to USD 72.7 billion by 2024. 

Inpixon invites investors and other interested parties to hear more about this announcement and its plans at the Inpixon Demo Day virtual event to be held Sept. 8, 2021, when it will be demonstrating its innovative technology along with its collaborators at Ostendo.