Jennifer Pallanich, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: Workers out in the field need to be hands-free and one company is taking hands-free operations to the next level with voice activated gear. Patrick Brumbaugh of RealWear tells us more in his Hart Energy LIVE Exclusive.

Patrick Brumbaugh, regional account manager, RealWear: It's more than a hat. It's actually a Android tablet that has been re-engineered to be worn on the head. The concept is to do everything you would normally do with a tablet, with your touch or your input or your mouse click. However, this is all driven by voice. It allows a worker to potentially be in a dangerous area, have their hands free, focus on their work, have real time communications back to a control center, network operations center, teams call, zoom call, you name it. We can put videos on the device, we can have drawings, we can have multi-step workflows all at the headset where the worker gets all these valuable instructions and never has to stop their work to grab something other than the tooling they need to do their job.

JP: That sounds like a real boon to people out in the field. And it looks like you've got two versions here.

PB: So this one is our latest product. It is intrinsically safe, which means it can operate in a class one div one hazardous area, which is in this particular convention, is very popular in the oil and gas world. And this is our non-intrinsically safe product is called the Navigator Series. It has very similar functionalities without the intrinsically safe components. Both of them have a high degree of modularity.

JP: Can I take one for a test drive? There we go.

PB: Alright. And I'm going to touch this and can you see anything?

JP: I can, oh my gosh. Okay, so I see like a computer screen.

PB: Absolutely. So this is what we like to refer to as a say what you see operating system so you don't have to learn commands. So let's get started with some simple ones. Why don't we say my camera.

JP: My camera.

PB: Alright now you should see this incredible arena right now. But let's say you want to take a closer look. Why don't you say zoom level three.

JP: Zoom level three. Oh wow. It just big-a-fied everything.

PB: Absolutely. So to even expand upon that, why don't you say, take a photo.

JP: Take a photo, preview. Oh, there's my picture. Zoom level two.

PB: Alright, now you're navigating within the document you just took, and that applies to pictures and PDF drawings.

JP: So I can kind of scan it.

PB: We have noise cancellation that works in industrial noise up to around a hundred decibels. So when a worker is in the field, if someone's on the remote end, remote end will not hear all that background noise. You have the headset on for less than a minute, yet you started to drive yourself. So it's a very simple device to learn and as long as you stay with the concept of say what you see, anyone with just two minutes of practice can use this device and begin the work that they need to do to make their business successful.

JP: And that's your Hart Energy LIVE Exclusive with me Jennifer Pallanich from ATCE.

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