With the rapid development of chip, AI, cloud computing and other foundations, as well as the popularization of 5G network and the release of the national 14th Five Year Plan, the value of VR /AR hard technology has gradually begun to land on a large scale, and the industry has entered a new round of rapid rise. It is expected that AR direction will usher in a climax of investment in the second half of 2021. Opportunities are only given to those who are prepared, forward-looking and stick to value.
“It’s a 10 billion market to use AI+Ar to help enterprises with digital transformation,” said Cui Haitao, founder of Goolton Technology. “We’ve always been positioned as a service provider that provides overall solutions for enterprises based on core optical display technology. I’m excited about energizing enterprises with innovation.”
In 2020, this cutting-edge AR technology company, which has only been established for a little more than three years. It devotes to provide best AR smart glasses and optical modules with customized R&D and services and has achieved an income of nearly 100 million yuan. It is incredible that the industry is still facing difficulties in landing and revenues.
After entering the factory and the workshop, Goolton Technology knows more about the actual sore points of B-end customers
Goolton Technology Beijing company is located in the office near Beijing Jiaotong University. It is compact and bright. Two mannequins at the door wear AR glasses with a full sense of future, and on the side is a set of cool, full of scientific sense, and intelligent whole-body individual soldier firefighting equipment. The people working here are all in a hurry, deal with their duties quickly with bright eyes. Their boss, Mr. Cui Haitao, is capable and experienced with humor.
Cui Haitao’s major in university is power engineering. He has been dealing with hardware and enterprise customers for more than ten years, from grass-roots experience in Digital China to management level, and then to continuous successful entrepreneurial experience. Through such experience, he has developed a special skill – good at exploring and grasping the pain points and needs of B-end users.
“Since we are facing the B-end,” Cui Haitao said, “we need to define our products from the needs of customers, because you can’t understand medical treatment better than medical customers and aviation better than airlines, so we often ask and listen repeatedly, guide customers to feed back the traditional and bottleneck problems faced by their industry, and use our ability to solve these pain points for customers.”
Once, Goolton Technology conducted an on-site user survey in a large airline and found that workers had to wear goggles to prevent dust from falling into their eyes when repairing Airbus A380. They immediately realized that AR glasses and traditional goggles could not be worn at the same time. Later, they considered putting AR glasses into goggles.
Cui Haitao said that we hope Goolton’s products will be used by users in their daily work. For example, the user behavior portrait of our product design is that every worker will always wear AR glasses from entering the factory gate to getting off work, which is convenient and comfortable. Chinese AR glasses will become a daily tool for workers, rather than just using glasses for demonstration and for visitors to visit. Our goal is to really improve the production and operation efficiency of customers with the use of intelligent tools and the increase of process coverage.
We know that there are great risks in the augmented reality oil and gas industry. Goolton Technology visited the customer’s field work and saw that most equipment maintenance is frequent and affected by the changing environment. In addition, there are many operation data information, which is easy to form a data island and difficult to share. Goolton Technology and customers jointly build a digital intelligent well site, conduct video monitoring through sensors at key parts of cameras and production equipment, add sensor real-time data on the basis of digital twin, and back-end experts and inspectors supervise and inspect through real-time pictures of front-end AR glasses.
Power patrol inspection also has similar high-risk operation characteristics. Workers have to climb the 30-40 meter high iron tower, so it is difficult to work at height. Workers face great challenges to complete inspection under safe conditions. Although UAV can replace some manual tasks, it is far from being able to open the cabinet door, find the corresponding position, open or close the button, especially to detect the equipment operation in the groove. The solution provided by Goolton Technology is to let power workers wear AR glasses, liberate their hands and greatly enhance their multi-task interaction and operation ability. During operation, workers can see the equipment description, real-time data, fault prompt and other information through AR glasses. Workers can immediately carry out maintenance work, and the back-end technical experts can have audio and video communication with them in real time. AI equipment can assist and supervise the place experts can’t take care of.
Max Tegmark, a lifelong professor in the Department of physics of MIT, divides life evolution into three stages in his book “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. Before reaching life 3.0 “the system can design software and hardware by itself”, we are now in the process of transformation from 2.0 to 3.0. We obtain hardware through evolution and many complex new skills through learning. About the latter, machine has partially replaced human beings, and its evolution speed is faster than we think. While learning customer needs, Goolton Technology pays attention to relevant training for machines, which can replace some manual work, and finally achieve AI autonomous learning and self evolution.
It is precisely because Goolton Technology usually pays attention to the research and development at the AI level, and can make timely response when customer has insufficient staff in an emergency. During the COVID-19, the staff of Dalian Jinpu customs used the AR glasses of Goolton Technology to remotely complete the remote inspection of important materials, especially imported medical devices. Moreover Goolton Technology has developed artificial intelligence tools for them. The serial number recognized by the naked eye in the past was scanned through AR glasses now. The system background received data in real time and automatically gave a prompt. If all the lights are green, the goods are OK. Release!
Cui Haitao stressed that the base competitiveness of Goolton Technology is independent optical technology. Only with the self-research ability of optical modules can it connect with the unique needs of various industries and provide highly customized products and services. At the same time, we understand the pain points of customers and can solve the actual needs of customers. These can be called the main weapon of Goolton Technology.
Create a “win-win” strategy for digital transformation with customers
With the deepening of cooperation with customers, Goolton Technology is not limited to the development of AR head display equipment, but will integrate AI+Ar technical services into the overall digital transformation of the enterprise. Besides, it is suitable for many industrial scences such as AR warehouse picking.
In the past, the aircraft maintenance of airlines had to go through multiple complex operation processes. After Goolton Technology helped Airlines create a background intelligent aircraft maintenance system, now based on technical means such as electronic sign, machine vision and AI supervision, workers directly confirm the completion in AR equipment after completing maintenance and cleaning, reducing the process time of the past 42 minutes to more than ten minutes, which greatly improves the traditional work efficiency. At the same time, it has accumulated valuable data resources for airlines.
“When you have a very deep understanding of the customer’s needs and implement concrete results, it also has great inspiration for the customer. The customer is not only the people from the technical department who often come to communicate with us, but sometimes the senior leaders will ask us for our opinions on some issues.” Cui Haitao said with emotion.
When the enterprise is determined to carry out digital transformation, the traditional relationship between Party A and Party B will also change. As Fan Xiaoxing, COO of Xiaoe Tech, said, enterprise services in the digital age are not only the relationship between Party A and Party B, but also to discuss and study the industry, explore the future development direction of the industry and tap the real needs of users. Because Goolton Technology is deeply involved in enterprise digital transformation, it has become a peer partner in the digital transformation journey of many customers. “We have a group discussion on the latest digital technology, process and management mode of the industry, and then put forward a set of digital scheme to try in the customer scenario to continuously reduce costs and increase efficiency. Both sides have benefited a lot.”
The development direction of Goolton Technology is highly unified with the direction of “accelerating the construction of digital economy, digital society and digital government, and driving the transformation of production mode, lifestyle and governance mode with digital transformation” emphasized by the state in the 14th Five Year Plan. They are very good at sitting down with customers to talk through their needs, and can think from the perspective of customers, and thing about how to use electronic and intelligent means to help customers effectively reduce their burden, and finally come up with an “overall solution and implementation scheme” for customers’ digital transformation. Under this framework, they will consider how to design highly customized AR glasses, SaaS system and digital twin simulation system respectively.
When enterprise customers have common needs, Goolton Technology will further consider making the needs put on platform and expand the scale of serving customers. At present, they have established four platform systems: remote video cooperation, digital twins, intelligent storage and face recognition individual soldier. In addition, for industrial enterprises, they have realized the selection of a variety of industrial applications from operation and maintenance to fault prediction; For the security field, it has launched products that can combine the advantages of AR glasses, such as target recognition, behavior recognition, posture recognition and abnormal spirit recognition.
Cui Haitao has been in business for more than ten years. In his words, one secret of successfully serving B-end customers is to be a customer’s “overall decoration” service provider, just like the “give the key, and customers can check in directly with their bags” in the field of overall home decoration. On the contrary, if you only do some parts of them, you will spend a lot of time “wrangling” with customers, and the profit will not be too high. Moreover, when you provide customers with “overall decoration” service, customers can only ask you for follow-up maintenance. Naturally, customers will have stickiness and renewal, and customers will feel more relieved.
Goolton Technology and B-end customers have been on the road of “win-win”. When the digital transformation scheme they cooperate with continues to be implemented, industry standards have been gradually established, and more industry customers and even the whole industry can use it. Imagine that the 200000 or 300000 workers of a large oil company, or tens of thousands of maintenance personnel of an airline, as well as millions or tens of millions of professional employees in security, transportation, medical and other industries, may wear AR glasses to complete their daily work in the future. This market may be worth 10 billion or 100 billion.
