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The wearables market currently stands at an inflection point. The early promise of Google Glass has faded away since Google stopped production of the current model in January, without any firm word on a follow-up. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch is selling quicker than Apple can produce them, with orders reportedly somewhere around the 2m mark.

But there is one segment of the market where the opposite is true, where smart glasses reign supreme and smart watches are struggling to find traction: the enterprise space.

“Smart watches and activity trackers are by far the biggest part of the wearables market, and theyre much more consumer-focused,” says Nick Spencer, senior practice director at market research firm ABI Research. “But if you look at smaller categories – stuff like smart glasses, clothing or gloves – thats all enterprise.”

This year, a total 145.4m wearable devices will be shipped, according to statistics from ABI Research, just over a third of which (50.4m) will be to enterprise customers. Take smartwatches out of the equation, though, and while overall wearable shipments dip significantly, to 63.6m, the enterprise market is hardly dented, at 46.3m. What this means is that other wearables device categories will account for over 90 per cent of the enterprise market.

“Smart glasses in a way were hijacked by Google and seen as a consumer product for a little while,” Spencer says. “But I think thats now reverted to where the business was in the first place, which is in the enterprise sector.”

Smart glasses
Smart glasses have a long history in the military and police force, and are increasingly being brought into warehouses and factories. Today, as well as Googles offering, manufacturers including Vuzix, Epson and Sony all currently have smart glasses on the market, and these devices fall into two broad categories.

The first, which includes Google Glass as well as the Sony Attach and Vuzix M100 glasses, are known as monocular or heads-up display devices. This refers to the single optical display over one of the wearers eyes, out of direct line of sight, so that the user can glance at the display only when they need it.

The other category of devices are binocular. This includes the Sony Smart Eyeglass and Epson Moverio BT-2000 – and arguably, at the far end, Microsofts forthcoming HoloLens. Binocular glasses use a display that can be seen by both eyes, in order to create a more immersive overlay of information. These devices enable an Augmented Reality experience, closer to what you might see in sci-fi films like Minority Report or Iron Man.

Tools for the task
“When you look at the wide array of devices that are available, they are very much different kinds of tools,” says Jeffrey Jenkins, COO and founder of APX Labs, the company behind Skylight, a multiplatform enterprise solution for smartwatches and glasses. “One is a hammer, and one is a screwdriver. You dont necessarily use them for the same job – you use the form factor that fits the job most appropriately.

“If you need to interact with other humans face-to-face very frequently, youre not going to want an immersive display over your eyes. Youre going to want to be able to make eye contact, so a HUD-style device might be more appropriate. But if youre doing work thats relatively stationary, where theres not much in-person interaction – say Im on top of a wind turbine servicing it – there can be a value to having a binocular display, giving you a larger canvas of information.”

As with any tool, there are a wide number of tasks where smart glasses can be used, but probably the single most common use case is remote assistance. This enables a worker in the field to stream video from the camera in their smart glasses back to an expert who can provide verbal advice, or send the specific information that they need to the glasses display.

However, this isnt the most efficient alternative because, as ABIs Spencer says, “you dont want two people constantly tied up with this one task”. The smarter option is an automated process that talks the wearer through a task, or gives them access to the supporting materials they need. This is the biggest area of potential, and its an idea that could be applied to any number of businesses.

“There are four core scenarios that we address,” says APXs Jenkins. “Weve broken it down into people who are building things, people who are fixing things, who are moving things from place to place, and who are operating large pieces of machinery.”

There are few large-scale businesses which dont include at least one of these scenarios somewhere among their workforce, and the list of companies – including Toyota, Boeing, DHL, Bosch, Virgin Atlantic and BMW – which have already deployed wearables internally in some capacity is not to be sniffed at.

“Today in the enterprise, we have logistics, warehousing and field service applications in the medical space, in gas and oil, people that are doing training, streaming video applications where you have a person in the field and theyre having a problem so they get professional help from the home desk,” says Paul Travers, CEO and founder of Vuzix, the company behind the M100 smart glasses. “Its an amazing list of applications.”

Each of these verticals comes with its own use cases and challenges but whatever the situation, the key benefit to workers remains the same. “Unlike a phone, where youd have to put your wrench down to read something, you can have key information displayed to you and interact with others without having to stop the work that youre doing,” says APXs Jenkins.

Kevin OSullivan, lead engineer at SITA Lab, the research arm of air transport technology firm SITA, agrees: “Wearable tech is great for staff who need to be roaming around a space, not sitting at a desk, staff who need to be connected to back end systems all the time for updated information, and staff who need to be hands free. That last one is the crucial ingredient. Weve had a lot of people coming with a great idea that we could put on Google Glass, but when you look at the use case, you end up saying, why dont you just use a phone or a tablet?”

Bring Your Own Device
When trying to predict the future for wearables, mobile is the obvious point of reference, but its far from a one-for-one comparison, particularly in the enterprise space. Smart glasses are simply too bulky and expensive for the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend to be practical. Similarly, the increasingly common practice of having separate handsets for work and personal usage is unlikely to apply with a pair of work-issued glasses.

The biggest difference, though, is simply in the kinds of workers who are given smartphones and smart glasses for work. While BlackBerry rose to prominence as the must-have accessory for businessmen, smart glasses are most commonly being used by blue-collar labourers. There is one device category that could possibly follow more closely in mobiles footsteps, though: the smart watch.

“In a way, the use case for smartwatches in white-collar careers is very similar to the BlackBerry, and the pager before that – entirely focused on communication rather than other applications,” says ABIs Spencer. “As it evolves, I think things like filtering of messages, and more intelligent or subtle interaction with your communications, will become an important part of the use case. You could sort through your contact list and identify this person as a smartwatch contact, so youll get an alert from them on your wrist, but then filter out WhatsApp or Facebook during work hours.

“As you start to filter and control your own messaging, thats where people start thinking yeah, thats useful – its actually de-cluttering my digital life, not making it worse.”

Productivity boost
This is the very least of the benefits that wearables could offer businesses. In situations where smart devices are being deployed at scale, like manufacturing and warehousing, being able to shave even a single second off a task that a worker repeats hundreds of times a day is a major productivity boost.

“Those numbers start to add up really quickly and its not hard to get people on-board with that idea,” says Jenkins. “The killer apps for consumer glasses will come, were confident of that, but the ROI for enterprise is kind of a no-brainer.”

“You might have to pay $1,500 for Glass, and thats expensive, but the reality is that in a business your biggest outlay is staff,” SITAs OSullivan says. “So if you can find some way to improve their productivity, then that amount is actually relatively modest in the grand scheme of things.

“In the case of the Virgin Atlantic project, the way that the dispatch process worked was that staff waited for the dispatcher to see a car coming and assign it to someone verbally. So the staff had idle time while they waited that they couldnt used predictively, because they always had to be half-listening for their name to be called. When we introduced the wearable technology, it meant this waiting time could be used productively – or just to relax.”

Case Study: Virgin Atlantic
The Virgin Atlantic project was the airlines trial of Google Glass and Sony Smartwatch devices at London Heathrow airport in early 2014. The pilot scheme remains one of the most high-profile deployments of wearable tech in the enterprise – and one of the few to hand this equipment to front-of-house staff.

Virgin equipped the staff in its Upper Class Wing with the wearables to make the VIP greeting process smoother. When a passengers car passed through a security barrier at the airport, they were identified using optical recognition of the number plate and their details were pushed to a member of staffs glasses or watch.

“From the actual passenger side, we were quite concerned about whether there would be a feeling of privacy invasion, when they turn up at the airport and a concierge has this high-tech camera looking at them,” admits SITA Labs Kevin OSullivan, who worked on the project. “But the reaction was quite the opposite.”

“Customers responded positively to an even more personalised and efficient service,” says Tim Graham, technology innovation and development manager at Virgin Atlantic Airways. “The devices themselves became a talking point and many customers were impressed and commented that it was exactly the sort of thing they expected Virgin Atlantic to do.”

“At an airport, youre used to having to validate your identity. You expect to be observed wherever you go, so the technology is being used in a way that doesnt cross the boundaries of what people expect,” says OSullivan.

The trial also proved popular with Virgin Atlantics staff. So popular, in fact, that it ended up running for three months, nearly twice as long as had originally been intended.

“These were staff who are not particularly used to having tech all the time, but because it brought them genuine value when dealing with these VIPs, they really liked it,” says OSullivan, who worked on the project. “In fact, we had difficulty taking it away from them at the end of the trial, which is a great sign.”

One of the key learnings from the trial came from the fact that both watches and glasses had been tested, as OSullivan explains. “We thought Glass might be a bit too in your face but it actually turned out to be more discreet, because the way you wear it, you glance up to the screen. With the watch, however, youve actually got to turn down and look down at your wrist, and thats the universal sign for indicating Im bored, Id rather be somewhere else – so those staff with the watches had to constantly apologise and explain.”

Overall, however, the trial was a success and while Virgin hasnt reinstated wearables in this capacity, this certainly isnt the end of the story.

“We are continuing to investigate ways in which we could utilise wearable technology in other operational areas, such as airport customer service, aircraft turnaround and engineering,” says Virgins Graham. “Were also looking at how we could utilise devices worn by our customers to provide a more personalised, relevant and efficient journey through the airport or on board.

“We are also currently undergoing a trial of Sony SmartWear in our engineering department, and will be looking at how wearable technology could benefit airport staff over the next few months.”

Targeting the enterprise
Of course, its not just the businesses deploying wearables which stand to benefit. From the perspective of the manufacturers, theres a major benefit to targeting the enterprise, as it sidesteps one of the primary problems these products have faced in the consumer market: the way they look.

“To date, every piece of wearable technology has been very techy and clunky-looking,” says SITAs OSullivan. “You need to be quite a nerd to go walking around with Google Glass on your head. But staff already wear equipment, and you can tell staff in a warehouse or a baggage hall: wear this, its part of your work, and at the end of the day you take it off when youre done, and itll be a benefit to you during the day. People dont want to wear something that looks ugly – but if youre paid to wear it, you will.”

“No one was ever berated for wearing a hard hat on a construction site,” agrees APXs Jenkins. “You wear it because it performs a function, because it makes you safer and better at your work.”

This is not to say that good design isnt a consideration in the workplace, however. Vuzixs Travers tells us that, even when the company was working with the US military in the 90s, its goal was to cross the Oakley gate. “Meaning, if we could make a pair of smart glasses that looked like a pair of Oakleys, then almost every military personnel would use them in the field.”

More important than looking cool, though, is the practical consideration of real people wearing these devices nine to five in the workplace.

“Everyone wants their employees to feel comfortable during the day,” says Travers. “There have been many products in the enterprise space that have come and gone because an hour after you put it on, you have a headache from the weight of it.”

Cracking the market
Cracking the enterprise market, with a device that looks and feels like something you might actually want to use at home, may prove vital to the future of wearables industry.

“If you look at the way smartphones made their way into the marketplace, most peoples first exposure to a smartphone – before the iPhone or even the BlackBerry, in the days of the Motorola Q and PalmPilot – was almost universally through a device that they worked with,” says APXs Jenkins. “I think its going to be the same way with smart glasses. People are going to see them at work, on the people working around them.”

If smart glasses currently have an image problem – and the emergence of the term Glasshole is probably enough to tell us that they do – then seeing them on friends and co-workers might be the best way to help normalise these clunky, nerdy devices.

However, the enterprise market is more than just a means to an end for wearables. While the consumer popularity of smartwatches and activity trackers leave smart glasses in the dust, it looks like they can find a natural home in factories, warehouses, and just about any other business where small commonly-repeated tasks are the order of the day. As the technology develops, it wont be the devices themselves that matter but how theyre used – just like any other tool used by workers.

“The smart glass technology is still too limited,” says SITAs OSullivan. “To be honest, all wearable technology is very much in its infancy. I think its very possible to find an appropriate use case and put these devices to work and theyll be of benefit for you but I dont think were at the stage where we are with phones and tablets where its a general-purpose computing device that will be a net benefit to everybody. You have to choose carefully how you deploy it.”