Video: Elevator repair gives Microsoft HoloLens a lift
Aviad Almagor is manager of this mixed-reality app in the property survey and construction firm Trimble, which has been working with Microsoft on Hololens.
Almagor worked with an architect in California that had been presenting the redesign of this deserted Packard plant in Detroit in the Venice Biennale design festival in Italy.
“It’s a project that’s half a mile long, it has got pretty intricate geography; it is in many segments, all of which are complex spaces,” explained Almagor. “With mixed reality, you are able to move in the tabletop scale perspective, which helps you understand the connections between various segments in the project, to full immersive perspective in one to one scale, which means you can physically walk through the design and find out the way the visitor will experience the design. Moving between the two handed them a great view of how the design was progressing”
Utilizing HoloLens let architect Greg Lynn test out ideas and immediately see what impact they would have during the giant structure, rather than having to wait weeks to make those decisions.
Being able to experience a space liberally is also useful for working in harsh environments where you don’t wish to spend a lot of time on website, like open pit mines.
Trimble is working with partners like Caterpillar to put sensors and scanners onto mining gear to have a thorough 3D perspective of the mine construction, and also the locations of the machinery for monitoring and planning.
“No-one wants to be in the mine. It’s much better if it is possible to monitor it in a remote place, which improves safety,” explained Almagor.
“If you take the 3D geometry along with the detector information and include mixed reality, you receive a solution which permits the mining engineer to sit down in their workplace, which could be tens of miles apart from the authentic mine and then visualise the true mine almost in real time.
“You are able to visualise the geometry of the mine in tabletop scale or you’ll be able to jump into the immersive view and actually be inside the mine. It is possible to see changes in the slopes of these walls in addition to the advancement of mining task. You can visualise the machinery almost in real time. You can visualise the blast holes , or see where substances are obtained from and where they’re stored. The engineering data you need to efficiently deal with the mine is there in reality”
What Trimble calls a ‘materials rainbow’ arches wherever the material will be mined to where it is stored. The mining engineer can also replay the motions of mining gear to check if operators are subsequent processes properly, or if there is a more efficient means to do things.
The mining system features similar benefits to those architects are visiting from HoloLens, he states: “It’s all about visualisation, communications and collaboration — co-located.”
Almagor also pointed out that building those kind of adventures is getting easier. When Trimble began attracting HoloLens and Sketchup to design and engineering companies, they needed to run multiple pilot programs and supply support services to help them fit in their workflow.
They will still offer you those if required, “but now we have clients purchasing them as a commercial alternative,” states Almagor. “They buy the software along with the HoloLens plus they don’t need us”
Authoring is getting easier thanks to tools like PTC’s ThingWorx Studio MR as well as the brand new Simplygon rendering service on Azure. ThingWorx Studio is a web app which allows you build 3D scenes (such as HoloLens or mobile AR) by dragging and dropping existing CAD models, connecting them into detector data and adding voice and gesture controls for interacting with all these models. Simplygon can significantly lower the file size of 3D resources and still keep the fidelity to get HoloLens.
Personal and collaborative
KPMG’s analytics and data group is employing a HoloLens app for information visualisation in the Insights Center in Frankfurt where it presents groups of corporate executives in its Fortune 500 customers.
The 3D visualisations could show more measurements of information and ensure it is much easier to understand, and the entire group can view them at once. The HoloLens system will soon visit KPMG Insight Centers in Hong Kong, London, Paris, and New York later this year.
Having the ability to collaborate is important in consumer scenarios also, and it is something HoloLens enables rather greater than a VR headset, and it can be much more isolating.
“Yes, I can design my kitchen in VR, but I can’t interact with the sales associate while I’m doing this. They want the client to be actively working together to make design decisions,” says Forrester analyst J P Gownder.
That is much easier to do when you’re able to see who you’re speaking to, rather than only in a store.
“Anywhere where you have interactivity involving multiple employees that are together in a true space, performing 3D visualisation is possible in VR but it’s more desirable in mixed reality. There’s still something about the social component of working together that mixed reality is going to be better because you need to have that social interaction”
The matter with that type of 3D design system is getting the 3D resources for all of the parts and elements that you want to show; Gownder cites an online furniture retailer which conveys many thousands of different products but only has high excellent 3D designs for several 15,000 of them.
Architects and engineers that are designing jobs in 3D within their own CAD systems have an edge because they could reuse those resources for virtual and mixed reality advertisements. Some high-end condo developers selling off units off plan are already utilizing 3D walkthroughs.
Other interesting HoloLens programs are still coming. CLAIRITY is testing its augmented reality SmartBinocular air traffic management system in Budapest International Airport, along with a HoloLens version called HoloTower is in evolution.
UK police forces are looking at Dark Marble’s TuServ command and control center, which lets the officers co-ordinating a significant incident view info in multiple, virtual displays, according to the provider. Officers in those drives already utilize the mobile TuServ app to capture event reports and signs on tablets and phones and that feeds right into the command and control interface, alongside maps and other relevant details. “HoloLens is expensive, but a control and control room which you simply use a few times a year is much more expertise,” points out Rob Hancock, Black Marble’s development manager.
Where HoloLens really shines is in circumstances where you have no other means of viewing something 3D. Professor Mark Griswold of Case Western Reserve University, which is teaching medical students body with HoloLens, states that despite being spent decades studying MRIs of the human mind “I never really understood their 3D arrangement until I saw them in HoloLens.”
And one geologist in NASA told Gownder who “he learned more in a week with HoloLens than that he had in six months with 2D vision”.
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