Enterprise augmented reality: AR applications are just around the bend- Valutrics

Productivity gains from AR applications

While Pokémon GO may have been a wake-up call for many, some organizations were already hard at work and gaining significant productivity benefits from AR applications.

“Pokemon makes AR seem easy, but it’s not,” said Dexter Lilley, executive vice president and COO at Index AR Solutions in Williamsburg, Va., a company that grew out of AR research that started in 2011 at Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), a subsidiary of Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII). As director of corporate strategy and business development at HII, Lilley became involved in the work in 2012 and helped launch Index AR in 2015 to commercialize the technology with the blessing of NNS.

“We were industry and process experts who learned how to do AR,” he said.

Developed with PTC’s Vuforia AR platform, one shipbuilding application helps workers identify and remove temporary steel — the steel that helps hold ship parts together during construction but is not needed when construction is complete. In the past, correctly identifying and removing temporary steel was time-consuming. Workers had to repeatedly refer to unwieldy printed diagrams and mistakes could be costly. On an Apple iPad, the Index AR application allows workers to view a portion of the ship with temporary steel colored in green, while permanent steel appears in purple on the screen. “With the AR app, the process took only 90 minutes, not a week,” Lilley said.

Such inspection applications tend to require that workers’ hands be free. By setting the iPad on a stand, ship construction workers gain hands-free operation, Lilley pointed out. Although headsets naturally confer hands-free capability, Lilley said they are not yet suitable for his applications. He has found they are too heavy, run too hot and are too delicate and costly for extended use. “But that could change in the next six to 18 months,” he said.