Stannah: Home upgrades in augmented reality

“We can explore the controls and function of the product, and look at the texture of the upholstery. And it really does allow the customer to see what their stairlift will look like within their home”.

Our homes are sacred, and when we modify them or bring in new things, we want to know that the change will be seamless - that we’re still going to love the space we inhabit. This is especially true when you need a stairlift installed for the first time, a piece of equipment you may never have imagined would find a place in your home.

Stannah is an elevator company, working with augmented reality to bring comfort to their customers. From upholstery choices to chair types and rail colours, Stannah Engage allows the company to show their customers exactly what their new stairlift will look like in their home - and how it’ll move. In this episode we meet Charles Symonds, Stannah’s Digital Product Development manager, at their HQ in the UK to learn about the rich 100-year history of this family-run business. And we try out Engage and find out how transformational this AR driven solution has been for the customer experience. 

We also hear from JJ Lechleiter who heads up PTC’s AR division. He explains how Stannah is using Vuforia Engine, PTC’s market-leading augmented reality solution.

Find out more about Stannah here.

Find out more about Vuforia here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Andy Jones. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where home upgrades start with augmented reality. I’m your host, Paul Haimes, from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

A new TV, sofa, bed – bringing anything new into your home can be a risk. Will it fit? Will it match my décor? Will I still love it in six months’ time? This is especially true when you’re bringing in something you’ve never needed before. Stairlifts aren’t your standard home accessory – but when mobility is an issue, they’re an absolute lifeline. That doesn’t make it any less daunting for those having them installed for the first time. Knowing this, elevator company Stannah has brought in the help of augmented reality. Using a special app, the team is able to show customers exactly what their new stairlift will look like in their home, even down to the fabric type. The technology is truly amazing. 

Stannah as a business has been around for 155 years. Founded by Joseph Stannah in 1867, our roots were in the dockyards of London, where Joseph Stannah was designing cranes and hoists for unloading ships and secured a number of patents for his inventions. We moved on from cranes, and then from 1975, we developed our first stairlift product, which we are of course now most famous for. 

The factory here in Andover is split into two. One side of our factory is steel fabrication, so we have lasers, we have welding going on, and we also have a paint plant. The parts move on from there to the second part of the factory, where we assemble our chairs and carriages. The production line for the moving element of the product – the chair for our user, the carriage which contains the drive assembly, and the footrest – is a continuous production line where we have a number of operatives assembling the products. Interestingly, at the very end of that product, we have a 100% test, and every product is fully loaded to a payload and goes on a journey along a mini stairlift rail to ensure it’s both working correctly and is safe to go out to our customers. 

The factory is very much the physical elements of our business, but digital transformation also offers huge opportunity to build our customer base and support our customers, so we’ve got a brand new product – our AR application, Stannah Engage. We’ve been developing this since 2012, so we were very early in the adoption of AR to try and support our sales teams and build confidence in the customer and our ability to meet their needs with our products. We are now launching a brand new version of this application. It’s moved on a long way since our first app, which was marker based. The latest app utilises PTC’s Vuforia Engine and is completely markerless, which makes it a far more natural experience. We can get very close to the virtual stairlift to explain the features of the product and the controls and look at the surface textures of upholsteries, but also we can get a long way away so the customer can get a real appreciation of how this product might look in their home, how the aesthetics of the product, or the upholstery choices that they make, will sit alongside their home decor choices of wallpaper and carpets – and ultimately build their confidence in Stannah’s solution being the best to meet their needs.

Stannah Envisage is an application intended to be used by the sales advisor. The original application, which we launched in 2012, was groundbreaking at the time. It did have some challenges, particularly around needing to keep the tracking marker in shot – we had a QR code which the product was anchored to. If you got too close to this and it dropped out of view, then the product would disappear. If you got too far away from it when trying to compose a nice shot of the product and its surroundings, then the product would become unstable and slightly jittery – so utilising ground tracking technology really adds a level of robustness and smoothness to the experience. The first step of the onboarding process is to specify the product. When the product is specified, you can move into the customer elements of the product where they can specify their own choices and start to have their input. The first of those selections is to choose the colour of the rail. Next, we can choose from a number of different chair types. And finally, they can choose the upholstery options that they would like on their chair. So not only do you get a visual representation of how it looks in terms of its size and where it fits, you actually get to see the one you would buy. This is a much more tailored sales approach, and this is one of the big benefits. It really does allow the customer to see what their stairlift will look like within their home, which both helps build engagement and confidence in the purchase.

After configuring the product, the next step is to utilise the ground tracking engine, and we see some white dots appearing across the floor. And by just smoothly waving the iPad over the floor plane, the product will appear. It looks very vivid and real to life, and it’s exactly the right size in the right place. The beauty of it being markerless is that we can get very close to the product, so we can go in and start exploring both the controls and the function of the product, but we can also start to show surface textures. So we can look at the texture of the upholstery up close as well as getting a long way away from the product and see what that product will look like in its environment. Once placed in a position, the sales consultant can try and sync the product into his natural environment. We have the ability to alter the angle of the rail so that it matches the angle of the customer staircase, we have the ability to alter lighting – so if there is a dominant light source coming in from one direction, then the product shadows can match that. Once we have the product virtually in situ, we can demonstrate lots of the product’s functionality; we can show it in its folded state, and it fully animates as well. We’ve tried to make the product as lifelike as possible, so the folding mechanisms fold the product at a nice smooth rate. We can also rotate the product so we can show the boarding position where the customer will get on or off the product, and finally we can travel it upstairs so they can go on a virtual journey.

We’ve had some great feedback from customers, and those in the property can get a reassurance on the product they’re buying. But sometimes the customer isn’t at home, they might be in hospital, and they may not be able to return home until the stairlift has been installed. There was a great story of a gentleman who was in hospital, and the sales advisor had been to the property and completed the sales visit, and was visiting the gentleman to show him the quote, and he presented the Envisage visualisation of his products. His first reaction was, “Wow, you’ve installed it already?” Sadly, we hadn’t, but it was a great reaction. Stannah’s real mission is that we’re in the business of providing independence by moving people and goods in and around their homes and buildings. But really, it can be that we turn up to a customer and they literally may not have been able to access the upstairs of their home for a period of time. Our products offer them both the freedom to access but also to enjoy their home again.

Stannah’s Envisage application was created using Vuforia Engine, PTC’s market leading augmented reality solution. Vuforia is really a suite of enterprise AR apps that enable our customers which are industrial enterprises to improve the efficiency of their frontline workforce. And that’s important, because 75% of the workers globally are actually out there on the front lines; they’re working with their hands, they’re solving problems, they’re building things, they’re servicing products. And these workers, they haven’t had the tools to have access to the information that they need when they need it. So when they’re out there working with their hands, they’re working with often outdated methods when they’re training, when they’re upskilling themselves. They’re working with paper manuals, they’re working with procedures that are that are costly, that are outdated. And in these cases, it’s a very time-consuming process to get up to speed to learn new procedures. And when they’re using these outdated training methods, it’s really high cost, as you can imagine. They’re not up to speed, and you’re going to see delays in critical procedures, you’re going to see downtime in machinery, you’re going to see mistakes made, that lead to scrap and rework. And so, the Vuforia suite is really aimed at using augmented reality to address these challenges, to accelerate the learning process, to reduce training costs, to streamline knowledge capture, the creation of new procedures. And in doing this, we can make the employees, the frontline workers, happier in doing their job – they’re using modern technology to get up to speed and level up – and we can keep them safer, we can keep them in compliance with the policies at their companies. And when they have access to this information through augmented reality, that’s information in their field of view on the factory floor, out on a service visit. They can be guided directly through tasks, as they’re experiencing them, with their hands free. And that’s a very powerful capability that can enable them to be much more efficient – and save money for our customers.

Stannah is using Vuforia as a visualisation asset, but it also has a large part to play in the service and manufacturing industries as a whole. Augmented reality and Vuforia can really be deployed all across the enterprise. There are use cases in engineering, service and manufacturing, and sales and marketing – like with Stannah. What’s really interesting to me about Stannah is that they are leveraging the 3D information, the design information, for their products for sales and marketing purposes. So all of that same product data that was used to design and build the products actually is a scalable source of content that can be used for sales and marketing. As they’re talking with their customers, that gives them access to all the configurations and different product versions that their customers can purchase, so they can visualise it in the context of their physical environment. That same paradigm is what makes augmented reality so important for service and manufacturing use cases – the ability to use existing product data for augmented reality. And when you use augmented reality for manufacturing, when you’re using augmented reality to supplement, to train, or in the process of an assembly procedure, you can actually derive pretty amazing results. You can take workers who may make several mistakes as they’re getting up to speed with a paper manual or a digital instruction manual, and when you provide them the information that they need in the context of the assembly that they’re looking to build on the factory floor, they can get through those procedures in less time and with significantly fewer mistakes –and that translates over to significant business gains. 

Now, there are a lot of different types of augmented reality content that you can provide to a frontline worker for a manufacturing or service use case. By connecting the digital thread with other product sources from PTC, we can display real time IoT data in the context of a physical environment, in the context of a live and operating machine, to provide information that’s time critical to the frontline worker. We can display content that is configuration managed, meaning it’s the actual content that is relative to the machine as built that the frontline worker is working on, that can be custom for all the variations of the machine that exist on the factory floor. And we can capture and produce augmented reality content that is powered by the subject matter expert actually taking their expertise in the context of the job that they are doing, and then use that to train all of the new frontline workers that might be coming on board and requiring the same training procedures. And we do that in the context of manufacturing environments on the machines that are sitting out on the factory floor.