←back to thread

Ask HN: Anyone using augmented reality, VR, glasses, helmets etc. in industry?

81 points NewUser76312 | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 15:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source

Since Google Glass made its debut in 2012, there's been a fair amount of hype around augmented reality and related tech coming into its own in industry, presumably enhancing worker productivity and capabilities.

But I've heard and seen so little use in any industries. I would have thought at a minimum that having access to hands-free information retrieval (e.g. blueprints, instructions, notes, etc), video chat and calls for point-of-view sharing, etc would be quite useful for a number of industries. There do seem to be interesting pilot trials involving Hololens in US defense (IVAS) as well as healthcare telemonitoring in Serbia.

Do you know of any relevant examples or use cases, or are you a user yourself? What do you think are the hurdles - actual usefulness, display quality, cost, something else?

1. jlarocco ◴[25 Jun 25 17:08 UTC] No.44379598[source]▶
I work at a company that does CAD data translation (multiple formats into 3D PDF), and a while back we had an internal hackathon where one of the projects added basic support for VR glasses to our desktop app. It was really neat, and there was some excitement about it, but there hasn't been much follow up. I think the key issue is whether or not it adds enough value to justify buying everybody a headset, and for our use case I don't know if it does, though I'm just a lowly programmer, I don't know what the customers think about it.

We have another product that's geared towards collaborating and sharing data between teams and vendors, and it seems better suited there, but that one is a web application, and I don't know how well VR glasses are supported there.

I think it'd be awesome in the CAD applications themselves but I don't know if any of them support it out of the box.