A nine weeks mixed reality accelerator program was conducted at University of Hull by Microsoft and VISR from June to August 2018.
Total, 25 students selected from top universities of the UK were part of the program. This program was attended by Swapnil Nilajkar (Design Lead), Santosh Vishwakarma (Technology Lead), and myself from LearningMate. We were accompanied by 4 bright students who worked on our proof of concept(POC). Similar to LearningMate, there were four more companies which include – Centrica, Audi, AB InBev, and RB. The final outcome of this accelerator was that each company had a Mixed Reality POC built using Microsoft Hololens.
All the participants were fortunate enough to be meet in person different Microsoft experts who shared their experience of working on Hololens which includes:
- Warwick Hill (MD Western Europe Microsoft For Startups)
- Pete Daukintis (Tech Evangelist #MixedReality MSc 3D Graphics)
- Lee Stott (Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft)
- Leila Martine (Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft)
- Roger Walkden (Commercial Lead, Microsoft HoloLens – EMEA & Studio Manager, HoloLens London)
LearningMate’s POC Snapshot:
Below is the “Electric box” which we used as a targeted object. It consists of input, maintenance, and output switches. In addition to this, it had a fuse placed on it.
POC – A mixed reality application will be used by the Engineers and includes the following key features :
On the Job Live Information –
- The engineer will wear the Hololens and scan the electric box. Upon scanning, they will get live information about the electric box.
- For eg – What is the present status of the electric box? Who was the previous engineer who worked on the electric box? When was the last maintenance performed? etc. The live data will be fetched from the database and shown to the user.
Interactive guide –
- The engineer will be guided to perform a maintenance task on the electric box.
- Hololelens will tell the user to perform actions, for example, step #1 – insert and turn the key to left, step #2 – turn the input switch to the right, step #3 – turn the maintenance switch to left, and so on.
- The task will be to replace the damaged fuse with the new fuse.
- There are total 8 unique steps that the user have to perform in order to replace the damaged fuse.
- There is an IoT device attached to the electric box which detects that the action has been performed and then communicates with the backend to update the records and then the next instruction is shown to the user. This IoT device is thus the heart of our POC :O
- Now, there is no need for a trainer to train the engineer. Hololens is capable enough to train the trainer. Hololens is your new trainer !!
Remote assistance –
- The engineer can make a call to a person who is located remotely for any kind of assistance.
- The remote expert will be able to see on his desktop the same hololens view of the Engineer. Thus, an engineer who is based in the UK can now make a call to a remote expert who is based in the US for any kind of assistance required
Collaborative experience –
- In a simple sentence, Two or more engineers (who can be located remotely) can collaborate to assemble the electric box.
- These are the two bright students from the universities who worked along with us on the POC.
These were the key features that we implemented in our POC and as a take away now LearningMate is in a good position to work on any mixed reality project in the future
On a concluding note, it would not have been possible without the support of our bright students and VISR folks which includes – Sijan, Ahmed, Jhonny, Adam (bright students from different universities) and Matt, Aslan, Alex, James, Will, Duncan, Louis, and Lindsay (mentors from VISR.)
This is just a beginning of a trailer, the complete movie is yet to come in future !!
Thanks to everyone!!
Cheers to everyone!!
From,
Vikrant