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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?

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isk517 ◴[25 Jun 25 17:28 UTC] No.44379796[source]▶
Yes, the company I work for has started using Hololens 2. We have a program that can overlay the 3D models from our CAD program onto the physical steel assemblies for QC. When it works, it works well and enables our quality checkers to perform checks faster and more accurately than using tape measures while going back and forth looking at a 2D drawing printed on 11 x 17 paper.

The biggest hurdles is that none of the large companies think there is enough profit to be made from AR. The Hololens 2 is the only headset on the market both capable of running the program required while also being safe to use in a active shop enviroment (VR with passthrough is not suitable). Unfortunately the Hololens 2 is almost 6 years old as is being stretched to the absolute limits of its hardware capabilities. The technology is good but feels like it is only 90% of the way to where it needs to be. Even a simple revision with double the RAM and faster more power efficient processor would alleviate many of the issues we've experienced.

Ultimately from what I've seen, AR is about making the human user better at their job and there are tons of industries where it could have many applications, but tech companies don't actually want to make things that could be directly useful to people that work with their hands, so instead we will just continue to toss more money at AI hoping to make ourselves obsolete.

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1. isk517 ◴[25 Jun 25 17:38 UTC] No.44379877[source]▶
The biggest issue comes from area mapping. In order to keep the hologram steady and anchored you need to perform a mapping process so that the helmet recognizes both the physical steel assembly and a bit of the surrounding area to keep it steady when moving around. The 8GB of RAM puts a limit on the amount of mapping data that can be stored putting a limit of the size of assembly you can work with, and since the mapping process relies on using the helmets own software that has not been work on in years it is extremely sensitive to any sort of background movement, which means it works best in as controlled of a environment as possible.

Right now we are just using it for special projects that are complex and have little margin for error. We'd like to be able to use it for everything but that isn't feasible with where the tech is currently stuck at.