Smart glasses in manufacturing

It is clear that, as connectivity becomes more streamlined, smart glasses will ultimately provide real value in manufacturing, reducing training time on the assembly line, allowing for more custom orders and improving quality control, repair, and maintenance with vision machine learning.

Many of these smart glasses augmented reality (AR) headsets will require reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency connections.

According to ABI Research, over 2.7 million of the 25 million connected Industrial Smart Glasses will connect over a 5G connection by 2026. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will account for more of the connections due to the desire to minimize connectivity costs, but glasses with Bluetooth will face bandwidth and latency limitations. Wi-Fi will have the bandwidth, but not the reliability necessary for mission-critical applications.