Augmented reality can make a real impact in field service workers in almost any industry. For a specific example, let’s look at a field technician visiting a problematic transformer at a substation.
Currently field technicians download test plans and view them on a laptop or iPad. They have to remain near their car as they conduct spatial reasoning with regards to electrical circuits and their locations. They have to hold some of they learned and deduced in memory, meaning they are eating up more bandwidth of the part of their brain that holds memory, conducts planning and spatial reasoning or navigation. This forces them to continually reference back and forth between the computer screen, supporting documents, tools and the work site. Many of the artifacts they will use are situated at angles and distances where they must turn away and effectively interrupt the mental process of fixing their eyes on the object they plan to use to do their work so that they can do the reasoning. They are basically switching between numerous cognitive tasks.
Below is a screen grab from a video of one technician conducting such procedures.
Field technicians show up to substations and other work sites without knowing how to navigate the site. They also need to find the proper tools and documentation for completing maintenance, tests and repairs to assets.
They continually circulate their eyes between consulting site plans, asking site staff where assets are located, monitoring asset performance and completing their task checklist. Their hands are likely juggling multiple items that they need to set down in particular locations and keep track of in order to do the job.
With augmented reality, field service workers don glasses at the job site. The glasses give them an internal map of the site they are at. Locations of tools and supplies are flagged or highlighted. Digital documents needed to complete a task appear in their field of vision. They can see any chart for an asset by shifting their attention to the asset. Field workers won’t need to remember anything or fumble with tools and documentation simultaneously. They can just focus on performing the work.
Here’s an example of how a substation needing maintenance might appear with augmented reality.
- The menu helps decrease the total space filled by UI elements. Only the current UI element is up. Others appear wilted until workers turn gaze at it or access it with their hand or voice.
- This check list helps the user complete their work.
- The radar helps them navigate the station. The orange square shows the location of the nitrogen they will need.
- A capacity indicator of the transformer cylinder is off in the distance. Relative size is used to indicate importance. It isn’t up close because it isn’t exigent and spatial relationship is the primary representation in use.
- The chart shows year-over-year performance for the transformer. The orange year shows the current performance which fluctuates outside the range it should be in.
- The problematic area of the transformer is highlighted to draw attention to the user
This is not science fiction. It is reality. All the technologies and features listed in this use case are completely feasible with many of the headsets coming on market in 2016-2017. One example I love is the Meta headset which has gesture tracking among other awesome features.