Vuzix collaborates with European Optical Group Fielmann and TeamViewer

In one of the most exciting announcements in the AR space for some time, Vuzix Corporation just announced a collaboration with the Fielmann Group – a giant in the eyewear manufacturing space and TeamViewer. Let’s look at what this could mean for the enterprise market and how it might impact the industry as a whole.

What was announced?

At its core, Vuzix suggests that the collaboration with Fielmann will allow the company to offer their customers purpose-built frames that can combine the technology of their existing smart glasses with the comfort, durability, and design that Fielmann frames can bring to the table.

The Director of Sales Optics at Fielmann said it like this: “Fielmann is focused on creating productivity, efficiency, and cost savings for our enterprise clients and digitizing the eyewear industry with smart glasses solutions for final customers.”

The CEO of Vuzix, Paul Travers, described the collaboration as follows: “The combination of Fielmann smart glasses frames with Vuzix smart glasses powered by TeamViewer Frontline and other software solution offerings provides fashion-friendly, comfortable, and vision correction script-capable wearable options for frontline workers to allow them to work safer, more efficiently and longer,”

As alluded to above, the other piece of the puzzle is the existing relationship between TeamViewer and Vuzix which is the heart of the AR platform itself.  By bringing together the platform-building expertise of TeamViewer, the technology from Vuzix, and the design from the Fielmann Group, you have a powerful combination of skills and expertise to create best in class solutions.

It’s expected that the collaboration will initially be visible in Vuzix’s M400 and M4000 smart glasses, but you can imagine that the respective product development teams are already at the drawing board, trying to uncover what co-creation between the various parties could produce.

What is the vision?

The vision for the collaboration is to make the Vuzix smart glasses more practical and comfortable for longer-term use. By allowing enterprise customers to use the smart glasses for longer without irritation or discomfort, it rapidly scales the potential of the glasses themselves.  This will improve productivity and efficiency, while also lowering the barrier to customers trying the glasses in the first place.

In addition, you cannot ignore the design either.  By making these glasses more fashionable, these smart glasses can become something that catches attention for the right reasons, rather than being an eyesore.  All of which serves to improve retention so that the technology has its chance to shine.

Fielmann themselves currently supports more than 11,000 enterprise customers and will start moving towards converting these clients into smart glasses wearers – to take advantage of the AR capabilities that can prove very valuable for training, safety and a variety of other scenarios.

All of this will continue to be built on top of the TeamViewer frontline framework and platform which allows companies to craft sophisticated AR applications and use cases without requiring in-depth programming skills. This means that these glasses act as a user interface for company-created AR experiences that can be updated and adjusted more flexibly.

Conclusion

The partnership between these three established companies is a big step in making the enterprise solutions more viable. With the technology and platform becoming more in harmony with the design, the opportunity for more effective deployments will only grow.

It’s an incredibly exciting collaboration and we can’t wait to see what comes of it for enterprise-level AR.