From left, Vivian Celachi, John Larrgui and Kevin Lowerre, all part of the Verizon Wireless small to medium business sales team, demonstrate a new video message board called NOVICAST Friday afternoon during the grand opening of the Innovation Station at Verizon's regional headquarters in Marshall Township.

MARSHALL TWP, Allegheny County — Verizon Wireless used the lunch hour Friday to showcase the next big evolution in wireless technology designed to boost business efficiency.

About 60 executives, employees and guests attended the ribbon cutting and grand opening of the Innovation Station, a new center inside the regional headquarters at 300 Allegheny Drive that gives commercial customers the opportunity to discover the best solutions to their communications needs.

Inside the tech lab, visitors are encouraged to get hands on with numerous mobile devices and applications built to take advantage of Verizon's high-speed cellular data network. The products, many of which are built by third-party companies, aregeared toward helping businesses and individuals set up mobile offices, establish remote monitoring systems or be in more than one place at a time.

“We're really excited about where this puts us for the future,” Jeff Arnold, Verizon's regional director of data sales, said during the ribbon cutting.

Afterward, Tom Hillman, Verizon's manager of wireless data, showed off a number of products.

One piece of equipment, Ericsson's Office in a Box, establishes telephone and Wi-Fi Internet access through a cellular connection. He said construction and shale gas drilling companies have been putting such products to use.

Another product used by those industries is a solar-powered remote outdoor video surveillance device made by Pix Enterprises of Export, Westmoreland County. Hillman said one customer even has used the device as a way to study bears in the wild.

Next to that, an on-site vending machine was rigged with wireless technology that enabled it to communicate inventory levels and maintenance issues with a centralized server. Hillman explained the feature could be useful for vending companies that want to place machines beyond where land-based Internet connections reach.

A number of displays showed the wide-reaching capabilities of digital signage, which can be programmed wirelessly from another location and used to convey information in nearly any setting, from an airport to a retail store.

Solutions engineer Travis Rausch showed off another interactive technology that can bring ordinary product displays to life as interactive, three-dimensional images on smartphones and tablet computers. The technology, referred to as “augmented reality,” pairs a mobile device's camera with a downloadable program to produce an enhanced version of a product display on the mobile device.

One example at the open house transformed a paper advertisement for a boot laying flat on a table into a color 3-D image that could be viewed from all different angles on a tablet computer.

Rausch also demonstrated some solutions for the transportation and package delivery industries.

While mobile devices can be used to help manage vehicle fleets, they also can be used in asset management. He explained that mobile devices dropped into a package now can monitor all aspects during transit, such as exact location, temperature and whether the package was opened.

He also highlighted a device that can turn a vehicle into a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot, a feature he said is especially useful for emergency services.

Many of the products showcased were especially relevant to the health care industry.

One of those products was VGo, a slender, 3-foot-tall robot that was wheeling about the lab, interacting with attendees.

Toni Scully, a VGo salesman, was using Verizon's high-speed network to operate the robot remotely from her laptop, her face visible on a small screen, her voice audible through a set of speakers. A camera and microphone on the robot enabled her to see and hear what was going on in the room around the robot.

She explained VGo had been developed to help people interact more personally from remote locations, essentially mobilizing videoconferencing technology.

For example, she said physicians use VGo to connect with patients from remote locations. She also said the robots were being used in schools to help children too ill to attend class. Plus, because they can drive the robot from class to class, see their teachers and classmates, and be viewed by them, it creates a more personal experience.

Scully said the four-year-old company has about 400 robots in service across the country.