Industrial Augmented Reality – Who's Using It?

Building services engineer here. I think AR could be useful for &quot;x-ray&quot; views of services above ceilings and in risers where you&#x27;re trying to locate concealed equipment. When it&#x27;s sitting in front of you in a plantroom you really just need to look at it or have a regular screen to tell you what&#x27;s going on in terms of operations.<p>The big assumption is that the 3D model of equipment used by an AR app matches what&#x27;s actually installed on site. This is rare in my experience - particularly over time as maintenance is performed in bits and pieces without documentation being updated. It&#x27;s exceedingly rare to find an old building with accurate documentation of where everything is. I&#x27;d love an app that could compare a laser scan of installed plant with the 3D design model and automatically align them into an &quot;as-built&quot;.

This is a survey of potential industrial use cases that spans a variety of domains. The article feels like a submarine [0].<p>It&#x27;s hard for me to imagine getting from where most businesses are now (unable to share data internally among teams, limited investment in web dashboards that show live data) to a fancier &quot;live data overlaid with physical systems.&quot; Is there that much value differentiation? I get the tech appeal, and it looks cool. I&#x27;m not clear the cost&#x2F;benefit is there in general.<p>I do suspect AR will be adopted in two scenarios. In niche domains where cost&#x2F;benefit is acceptable (where?). And the other scenario is &quot;shiny buttons and blinky lights&quot; pet projects.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a>

I suspect nobody. There was this whole push to create &quot;enterprise&quot; use cases for VR once the current crop of startups realized the consumer market would never take off. A lot of them were successful at selling their useless prototype &quot;products&quot; to company executives, who I&#x27;m sure made unilateral decisions to implement the devices with no ask from engineering. But the technology is light years away from being practical for daily use. See: the entire MS&#x2F;DoD HoloLens debacle.

Summary: they surveyed 40 people and 1 was using it

I can&#x27;t see a device that displays graphics between a person&#x27;s eyes and any feature of an industrial plant being very popular with said industrial plant&#x27;s lawyers.

I think there is a misconception that the &#x27;metaverse&#x27; can be some kind of data driven visual experience that we immerse ourselves in.<p>The real metaverse is what lives inside our heads - that we communicate with each other to (hopefully) build a shared mental model with enough concordance with real reality to be useful to us. All media (including AR) is no more, and no less, than this communication.

From this article, AR devices seem much less wanted than a durable phone with a bright screen that can unfold to 2x&#x2F;4x size.

Our business is construction not industrial&#x2F;manufacturing, but I would love AR! It seems like a no brainer (insert robot overlord comment here).