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81 points NewUser76312 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | 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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curiouscavalier ◴[] No.44379438[source]
The adoption of it in various industries for training is larger than most people might suspect. First responders and retailers have some of the largest internal deployments out there, but they aren’t massively publicized (most people would never guess who’s fielding the largest fleet of headsets right now). That said, it’s still not mass adoption.

At the end of the day, you are asking someone to put something on their face that is still very different ergonomically than glasses (and I’m not sure even glasses would overcome enough friction). The ROI has to overcome the business (or personal) friction of buying the hardware, the friction of the form factor plus any friction from changed workflows.

Now put that in an operational workflow instead of training and the risks go up. Most are still skeptical of device reliability (not to say there aren’t suitable devices for operational roles but the perception is still a hurdle, and the applicability is often device-specific). Now add on to that limited experience with devices (many decision makers have never put one on), added security complications, specialized software development skills, limited content libraries and very real accessibility concerns and a lot of enterprises can never get past an “innovation center demo.”

For many industries the value proposition just isn’t there yet. But that said, I’d recommend digging a little deeper as there’s a lot of existing use-cases and deployments, both failed and successful, outside of IVAS.

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1. momocowcow ◴[] No.44380096[source]
This. I’ve seen businesses where sending a crew to a very remote location in the wilderness (natural resources, oil, mining, etc) is very cost prohibitive. The less time spent over there figuring out what’s up, the better. They’ll have software devs model the remote site in Unity or whatever then have the crew rehearse the task at hand in VR.