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

79 points NewUser76312 | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 15:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.429s | 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. mohan_g ◴[26 Jun 25 16:04 UTC] No.44388706[source]▶
We’ve developed VR based industrial safety training, as a self-contained, portable product for blue collar workers in India - launched about 24 months ago with regular updates.

Multiple companies have bought it, and we have large companies as clients who’ve used it to train 1000s of their blue-collar workers, even in sectors such as construction in a relatively challenging (in terms of pricing and value) market.

We have a significant (I think!) number of devices deployed, and most of my clients end up purchasing more after the initial purchase and pilot.

I think that’s for a few reasons:

1) VR, when well designed, can offer 1st person experience of being an accident victim due to the viewer’s own oversight / someone else’s oversight. That makes it a far more effective way to draw the learner’s attention to the importance of the safety protocols, etc.

2) Our solution is multi-lingual: it’s currently available in 10 regional Indian languages - that matters, since a significant fraction of the workforce may not understand English. Our localisation extends beyond that, but language is a big thing in enabling access and usage.

3) if you have to invest 10-15 min per learner (often one-on-one as the instructor) to onboard each learner before they can use your solution, it becomes very difficult to scale and raises the bar for cost-effectiveness. So that’s something we focus on heavily.

4) Setup time- don’t create a solution that requires IT support, someone who understands how to setup / load SteamVR / Oculus Link / meta Horizon. If the solution adds 20-30 min workload to the staff on a site, then adopting it becomes that much more painful - so we’ve worked very hard to develop an integrated system where the instructor can quickly onboard 10-15 learners and get going with the session in 5 min.

5) workflow changes: often, introducing VR means changing some part of the organisation’s workflow - many VR solutions don’t consider this / acknowledge this in their design- clients get initially excited, but when it comes to actually using it on a daily basis, the deployment and workflow frictions can completely tank VR adoption.

I’ve seen multiple solutions fail because of this, and we focus extensively on this when we design our solutions.

India is a hard market for VR, honestly because it’s very price sensitive. But I think we’ve made some progress here, because we’ve focused extensively on system robustness, ease of deployment, localization, and a lot of user-centered design.

We’ve also developed sophisticated VR - based training solutions for SOP training. VR can be / is, very effective for initial onboarding and SOP training. Again, the challenge here is usability - most of the learner’s don’t know how to use the controllers. Learning how to use the controllers is not easy and takes time. So that onboarding is critical and needs to be done well.

In SOP training, our experience is that it can, if designed well, significantly reduce on-boarding time; however, you still need the last 20% of training on the actual thing for it to stick, and for the learner to actually _learn_.

Edit: formatting and word choice

replies(1): >>44388960 #
2. mohan_g ◴[26 Jun 25 16:33 UTC] No.44388960[source]▶
AR is much harder as a solution to deploy at scale, I think.

First off, most solutions work poorly out in day light - especially the bright Indian sun. So that automatically adds friction in terms of deployment opportunities / field deployment.

The second issue is the limited FoV: 40-45 degrees. That's a pretty small display area to play with in terms of pushing detailed information, etc.

Third, again, the usability, ruggedness and user-onboarding challenges.

So, the use case has to be important enough and significant enough that the user / organization needs to accept all these frictions and still derive enough value out of the solution - that leaves very few use cases.

Add to that, HoloLens is expensive, hasn’t seen any significant development in the past few years, and real wear type devices too aren’t cheap for large scale adoption - a smartphone / tablet in hand is often a better / more maintainable / cost effective solution even compared to real wear - I’ve seen clients securely mount a smartphone on their helmet and setup a teams call for remote viewing - it works!