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

81 points NewUser76312 | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 15:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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NewUser76312 ◴[25 Jun 25 18:54 UTC] No.44380706[source]▶
Thank you very much for sharing your experience.

Quick question about your use case - is the 3D overlay really that important, or would you get most of the value simply seeing the blueprints in your heads-up display, maybe doing a quick finger swipe or voice command to switch between pages/images?

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1. isk517 ◴[25 Jun 25 19:34 UTC] No.44381065[source]▶
Yes, the 3D overlay is the entire point. A heads up display is just looking at the blueprint on a piece of paper with an additional layer of complexity, it wouldn't remove the need to manually measure, nor would it provide any assistance in spotting missing attached pieces (or some extra pieces). Once the model is overlayed QC goes from having to measure the placement of every pieces and the location of every hole to just walking around the finished assembly and ensuring that every conforms to the civil engineer approved model. A half hour process can be done faster and more precisely in 5 minutes, you notices very quickly when there is solid steel where the hologram has a hole, or thin air where the hologram shows that a plate was suppose to be welded on.
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2. cyanydeez ◴[26 Jun 25 19:31 UTC] No.44390505[source]▶
Have you looked into OpenSplat type of post-processing? You take a bunch of pictures and then let hardware create a 3d model. It's really competent and could easily create a rectified model for measurements. To get actual values, you'd need some control points, but beyond that, a pipeline that continiously creates models could be feasible.

Then your QC guys are mostly behind computers and rotated to the floor when things are identified.

Ultimately, your VR isn't doing anything more technically accurate than this.