Former Microsoft HoloLens man: It's NOT about gaming

If the equipment was needed to keep production going, then knocking down a wall - and charging the cost to the supplier - would be the quickest and most cost effective solution. Regardless of who made the cock-up, the situation needs to be fixed. But hey, you're right, it's a pretty miserable Monday morning!

It was only an example - the point remains the same, that it is a tool that can aid collaboration between (in the example) a structural engineer, an architectural systems engineer and a contractor. So they can discuss which wall will be the least headache to remove, given the location of services like electrical cabling and water, the height of lifting gear, that sort of stuff.

All modern building are design in CAD anyway, the Unity engine is already commonly used for architectural walk-troughs. The expected price of AR kit like this is tiny compared to CAD display systems of the past, and offers some demonstrable advantages. And that is just in one sector, architecture and building.

Or just get a trainee to help

Back in the 90s I use to be a CAD Draughtsman earning a couple of quid an hour. I was training in civil engineering at the time, which would change to electrical engineering then IT later on.

However I was put in charge of planning entire factories for some of the larger clothing manufacturers today, many of whom charge a fortune for their shoes which are made in foreign, low paying countries.

I'd have to work out the flow of goods through the factory, how supplies were brought in, movement of staff and maintenance of equipment as well as **** hits the fan full blown equipment replacements. I did this all using a DOS version of Autocad, a calculator, a note book and lots of talking to actual factory workers and managers.

It's rarely an architect who does this sort of work, they're far more interested in how the building looks and what it's made of, they expect engineers to fit everything into their vision but no way in earth would they give two hoots about the gear going in - unless it'd spoil the view.

Re: UWP

>How would a phone or tablet have the computational power to avoid lag in movement?

Very easily. It only takes a lot of grunt to shift 4k prettily rendered pixels around at 90 frames per second. If you just want to display more simply rendered polygons at a lower res - or even 2D schematics marking out the location of electrical cabling, say - the hardware required is far more modest.

'Lag' is not directly related to computational power per se - in the same way that bandwidth isn't the same thing as ping time.

Re: UWP

UWP is an API which works on Windows (including IoT), XBox, Windows Mobile and presumably other form factors in time. It sweeps 20 years of accumulated junk and obsolete / badly documented / deprecated functionality to be found in Win32, OLE2, COM and so forth.

The biggest issue with UWP is it is tied to Windows store and software makers are up in arms about it. They want the ability to write UWP apps that install and run from anywhere and from any store. Another issue is it is quite immature so 3rd party support is poor and some games have had issues like refresh rates and vsync but presumably those issues will be fixed in time.

Re: If that's their use case then its doomed

Exactly. Why walk around a large building when you can fly around it?

Even for real world scene overlays, I'd have thought that a simple head-mounted camera arrangement could be set up and fed to the computer for analysis, then have graphics overlay superimposed for feeding to the viewer.

Re: If that's their use case then its doomed

> I guess AR might be useful if it tells you which aisle to get some box from although I can think of lower tech solutions which would probably work better.

Not only which aisle, but which box. And show you a picture of the thing you need to get from the box. And then 'highlight' the desired packet for you, based on its general appearance or else (technically easier) reading the barcodes. I've worked in a second-hand book warehouse, and an AR system has potential to save time and in a few parts of the workflow.

If you are employing someone at minimum wage purely to pick items from stock, then any time savings quickly add up

>VR also competes for the architecture / full size use case

For the architects and clients, yes. For the site and the construction engineers, an AR approach makes more sense.

Only last week I was helping some friends prepare the concrete floor of a barn prior to internal partitions being fitted for stables. Whilst the job of envisioning the stables and calculating where to cut 'V' channels for drainage could be done in the head, an AR system would give reassurance, and the job of measuring and marking much quicker.

Then side boards had to fit in channels in the steel up-rights, with a notch cut into the ends of each beam to let them sit at floor-level. Due to deviances in the distance between uprights, and variation in the height of the poured-concrete floor, we couldn't use a standard template for each notch, and each board had to be offered up and marked. A system that would 'look' at the existing dimensions and then 'project' some cutting lines onto the wood would have saved some double-handling.

Re: If that's their use case then its doomed

The whole "not about gaming" thing wasn't Microsoft's tune a few years back

Cleaning the motion sickness vomit from the "holodeck" for a few years fixed that. VR and augmented reality are priceless when working on CAD and construction of any sorts. The actual hardware reqs for that are also low and the customers are well conditioned to pay extortionate amounts of money by AutoDesk and Co.

Games - not so much. On all counts - the money is nowhere near, the rates and reqs are off the scale, etc.

Re: Augmented reality?

You didn't notice that the example use-cases were all situations in which goggles and hard-hats, or other pieces of PPE, are commonly worn anyway?

Re: Call centers?

sarcasm tags

maybe not.