Augmented Reality To Help Mechanics Fix Vehicles 81
kkleiner writes "ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, is a head mounted display unit that provides graphic overlays to assist you in making repairs. An Android phone provides an interface to control the graphics you view during the process. Published in IEEE, and recently tested with the United States Marine Corps on an armored turret, ARMAR can cut maintenance times in half by guiding users to the damaged area and displaying 3D animations to demonstrate the appropriate tools and techniques."
Looks Neat (Score:5, Informative)
That technology looks to be pretty cool and excellent for routine maintenance, but I can see how it would suck for troubleshooting. For example the video in TFA locates a cable and instructs the user to unscrew it. With all that fancy visual stuff going on, it could be easy for the technician to overlook a pushed pin or a pinch in the cable which could be causing a problem. The small screen on a wrist-mounted phone would not be sufficient to display the necessary detail. The solution as-is is not suitable for finer military electronics which are tangled messes of RF hardlines, circuit cards, and even wire-wrapped backplanes. A full-size LCD to the side showing 3-D animation would be much more suitable for that. Additionally,
Which works fine for vehicles, but would totally suck for aircraft. Did the guys who came up with the statistics factor in the time it takes to set up and/or calibrate the camera array? Of course, embedding a few sensors within the vehicle and setting up the display's position with respect to them would be much easier.
Re:Looks Neat (Score:3, Informative)
I say use it more. This system seems to have quite limited vision, figuratively.
When you think about it, most of the structure of aircraft/tank/whatever simply gets in the way of seeing your surroundings properly. But that structure might become translucent once you're looking through an array of cameras placed outside the vehicle, outputs of which get combined to present a nice view of surroundings in your VR gear. A view augmented with useful info, too.
And it will work nicely with unmanned vehicles.
Re:Wait a minute! (Score:4, Informative)
Humans with an approximately human combination of strength and fine dexterity are so cheap that we routinely let the unneeded ones starve to death.
Blah (Score:2, Informative)
It feels like augmented reality is becoming the next buzzword to follow cloud computing. Honda in Japan have had HUD tech for years, where their repair people could identify engine parts. Apparently it made them something like 30% more efficient. Even this article has AR features and is from 2004.
http://www.allbusiness.com/automotive/automotive-trade-motor-vehicle-parts/5531755-1.html [allbusiness.com]
Call me when it can be put inside a contact lense or into the eye permanently, until then it's just a mash of tech we've had for a while.