Sector · Labels and batches

Look at the label, get the answer, keep both hands on the box

Warehouse picking is the oldest paying use of these glasses and the one with the most published numbers. It is also the only sector here with two studies that measured the technology losing.

Reading a code and getting an answer back is the smallest possible job for a pair of glasses, and it is the one that has been sold the longest. DHL ran a three-week pilot with 10 pickers in 2015, made vision picking the standard in 2017, and expanded it globally in 2019. Watch the numbers: 25 percent in one warehouse's pilot, 15 percent once it was spread across the operation. Both are real, they measure different things, and quoting the 25 without the 15 is how a case study becomes a sales pitch.

Neovia Logistics went from 10 units in 2018 to 85 in 2020, the largest intralogistics fleet at the time, with picking efficiency up 15 percent and new-hire training time down as much as 60 percent. DB Schenker reported better productivity in Bremen and Rodgau but published no figure at all, and said so through its own spokesperson, so that is how we carry it.

The two studies that say no

Ten pharmacy technicians at Houston Methodist inspected medication units for 90 days on a phone app and 90 days with the same app on smart glasses. The inspection took an average of 1 minute on the phone and 4 minutes on the glasses (P < 0.01), and satisfaction fell on efficiency, quality and communication. The authors concluded the technology is not ready for that task.

At a University of Sassari sheep farm, 18 people identified animals by ruminal bolus. The ordinary handheld RFID reader with a paper list won on time, 59.79 seconds against 82.72 for the Moverio BT-300 and 98.33 for the HoloLens 2. But nobody made an identification error with any method, and on the NASA-TLX questionnaire mental demand, time pressure and frustration were all lower with the glasses. Slower and easier is a real result, and which one matters depends on whether your bottleneck is the clock or the person.

Where it clearly works

The wins in this file are the jobs where the hands cannot be freed any other way: a hospital pharmacy in Luxembourg documenting sterile drug preparation step by step, which won a Pfizer innovation award; Australian meat plants letting a third-party auditor watch a compliance inspection live from outside during covid; Subaru cutting three-dimensional body measurement time by about 25 percent by mirroring the measuring machine's screen into the lens instead of walking back to a PC ten metres away. And the simplest one of all: a blind user pointing Envision Glasses at two identical sauce packets to find out which is the soy sauce.

Cited cases

Who
DHL Supply Chain / DHL Express (Vision Picking programme), with Ricoh, Ubimax and Vuzix
What they did
Order pickers use glasses with a HUD instead of a paper list or a handheld scanner: the camera reads the item's barcode and the display shows aisle, shelf position and quantity, with both hands free for the cart. The programme has three public milestones: a 3-week pilot with 10 operators in 2015, with Google Glass and Vuzix M100 (https://logisticsviewpoints.com/2015/04/16/picking-with-vision/); adoption as the standard in 2017, with Vuzix M100 and M300 running Ubimax's Xpick (the main source for this case); global expansion in 2019 with Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/dhl-vision-picking-program-google-glass-wearables/555636/).
What came out of it
In the 2015 pilot, 10 operators picked more than 20,000 items and 9,000 orders in 3 weeks, with a 25 percent efficiency gain. In 2017 DHL reported an average 15 percent productivity gain, better picking accuracy and new-hire training time cut in half, and began treating vision picking as a permanent standard rather than a pilot. In 2019 the programme's warehouses were holding the 15 percent and DHL started rolling out hundreds of second-generation Glass units. The two gain figures come from different scales: 25 percent in one warehouse's pilot, 15 percent in the spread-out operation.
www.prnewswire.com
Who
Neovia Logistics
What they did
A third-party logistics operator (3PL) uses Picavi glasses based on Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 for pick-by-vision: it scans motorcycle parts and retail goods barcodes through the field of view while picking orders in the warehouse for a global motorcycle-sector client.
What came out of it
Started with 10 units in 2018; by 2020 it was running 85 pairs, the largest fleet in intralogistics at the time, with another 100 bought for global expansion. Picking efficiency rose 15 percent (8 to 10 percent according to the initial pilot) and new-hire training time fell by up to 60 percent.
newyork.citybuzz.co
Who
Robert Schuman Hospitals (HRS)
What they did
The hospital pharmacy's production team (Marie Sevrin and Louise Tacre, under Anne Otto) uses Vuzix M400 glasses with the Flex4vision app to guide and document sterile drug preparation, scanning labels and recording photos and video of each step to give the process traceability.
What came out of it
Won the Pfizer Innovation Award for Innovation in Hospital Pharmacy (a EUR 10,000 prize) on 7 June 2024, for improving accuracy, efficiency and safety/traceability in the medication workflow.
www.vuzix.com
Who
Amazon (a UK fulfilment centre; integration by the Chinese firm Anbot/RealMax 安宝特)
What they did
Warehouse operators use Vuzix M400 glasses paired with a barcode/QR reader built into a glove: the glasses show the item type and pick position in the HUD while the glove reads the code without holding a separate scanner; the same system records tracking video and real-time monitoring during transport, and trains new staff from a first-person view.
What came out of it
According to the case study published by the integrator, the solution supported real-time decisions and significantly improved the operational efficiency of the warehouse and fulfilment centre; no numeric metric was disclosed.
www.arbigtec.com
Who
Vuzix (official barcode SDK)
What they did
The Vuzix/sdk-barcode repository exposes an Intent interface that opens the barcode scanning app already built into the glasses and returns the scan result to the developer's app, without having to request camera permission, and it is the standard way for any third-party app to implement label/barcode reading on Vuzix glasses.
What came out of it
Compatible with the M300, M400, M4000, Blade, Blade2, Shield and LX1. It is not open source: using it requires accepting Vuzix's own SDK licence agreement.
github.com
Who
Envision (testimonial from Vicky Cardona, Envision community manager)
What they did
A blind or low-vision user points Envision Glasses at table sauce packets so the AI reads the packaging text and label out loud and says which packet is which.
What came out of it
In the quoted testimonial she correctly identified which packet was soy sauce and which was duck sauce, purely from the label reading done by the glasses.
www.letsenvision.com
Who
Akraam Abdel-Kerem, Wenfei Wei, Aranzazu Calzado, Haley Blanck, Jane Scott and Ghalib Abbasi (Houston Methodist Hospital)
What they did
Ten pharmacy technicians carried out the hospital's periodic inspection of medication units, recording everything in a compliance app. For 90 days they used only the app on a phone; for the next 90 days the same app ran on smart glasses. The study measured documentation time and technician satisfaction. The published abstract does not state the glasses model.
What came out of it
A negative result: the inspection took an average of 1 minute on the phone and 4 minutes on the glasses (P < 0.01). Satisfaction fell on the efficiency, quality and communication scores; comfort and interface were unchanged. The authors conclude that the glasses did not improve inspection efficiency and that the technology still needs to mature.
doi.org
Who
Daniele Pinna, Gabriele Sara, Giuseppe Todde, Alberto Stanislao Atzori and Maria Caria (Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Sassari), with Valentino Artizzu and Lucio Davide Spano (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari)
What they did
The team built the SmartGlove, a glove with an RFID antenna that reads the animal's electronic ear tag or ruminal bolus and sends the code to the glasses over Bluetooth. On reading the tag, the operator sees that animal's record from the farm database on the lens: lambing date, age, milk yield for the last day and the last week, number of lambings and presence of mastitis. Two headsets were tested, the Epson Moverio BT-300 (assisted reality) and the Microsoft HoloLens 2 (mixed reality), against the ordinary method of a handheld RFID reader plus a paper list.
What came out of it
Eighteen participants, among them students, graduates and local interested parties, identified animals by ruminal bolus and looked up each one's group in the farm database. The ordinary method was fastest, at 59.79 s per task and 12.45 s per animal, against 82.72 s and 16.86 s for the BT-300 with the glove and 98.33 s and 21.32 s for the HoloLens 2 with the glove (p < 0.001). No system made an identification error. In the NASA-TLX questionnaire, mental demand, temporal demand and frustration were all lower with both headsets than with the ordinary method, with no statistical difference in any category; overall workload came to 29.72 for the ordinary method, 27.56 for the HoloLens 2 and 25.19 for the BT-300.
doi.org
Who
DB Schenker (contract logistics)
What they did
Order pickers use Picavi glasses based on Google Glass: the order information appears on the lens and the worker keeps both hands free, with no handheld scanner and no paper to hold. The barcode is read by a finger scanner or a glove, and in Rodgau the company also tested the ProGlove glove with a built-in scanner. The system is driven by buttons on the 200 g battery pack clipped to the belt. The article calls the device 'Picavi's Google Glasses' and does not say which generation.
What came out of it
Everything the article reports comes from DB Schenker itself, in reported speech. The company found better productivity in the test phase in Bremen and Rodgau; in Bremen, a site providing logistics services to the automotive industry, it says using the Picavi glasses produced a measurable and economically relevant efficiency gain compared with the previous handheld scanners, and that the solution cuts the error rate. No figure was published. The next step, adopting the solution as standard procedure across several sites, appears as an announced plan, not an accomplished fact.
transport-online.de
Who
Australian Meat Processor Corporation (AMPC) and the Australian company Bondi Labs
What they did
The person inside the plant wears Vuzix M400 glasses and streams live video and audio to whoever is auditing from outside, with both hands free for the work. The note says the glasses are used by Bondi Labs with AMPC support in abattoir compliance audits and inspections, carried out by third-party auditors and by the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. The note names neither the software nor any plant.
What came out of it
The manufacturer's note states that the cost of the glasses and software pays for itself in two audits, and that some larger plants run up to 80 audits a year. It puts the sector's annual audit and inspection cost at 100 million dollars. The rollout happened during the covid-19 pandemic, when an outside auditor could not enter the plants. No measured metric was disclosed: the payback in two audits is the manufacturer's own arithmetic, not a result recorded at a plant.
www.prnewswire.com
Who
SUBARU, body development section of the body production engineering department (the employee quoted in the case is Takahide Sugawara)
What they did
For three-dimensional body measurement (hole positions, surface waviness), the operator mirrors the measuring machine's computer screen over Wi-Fi onto an Epson Moverio BT-45C, running off a dynaEdge DE200 mobile PC, and drives the measurement with a wireless mouse. On the lens he sees the 3D model, the measured values, the colour map of the difference between drawing and part, and the procedure guide, without walking back to the PC at every step, which in the final process can end up 10 metres from the part.
What came out of it
About 25 percent less measurement time. The job stopped requiring more than one person and the number of forgotten measurement points fell. The page does not state the deployment date.
www.epson.jp

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