Very happy to see the holo lens improving. I'm hoping this can bring a growth in labour jobs which require technical skill for individuals who do not have any high-level training (e.g. electricians or mechanics). From a safety perspective, there is a lot that can be learned in envirnments like power plants, oil refineries or factories.
Why would you assume that electricians and mechanics don't have any 'high-level training'? Is it just because they didn't get a BS from Stanford?
Tech schools are a thing - and many of them are very good. And apprenticeship has been around for millennia, and is a wonderful way for someone to learn a trade or craft.
I think the parent's point was that unskilled people could preform those tasks. For example, I could look at my breaker box with a hololens and it could shade in the deadly parts.
I would think so, when you consider the lack of convenience involved in the following steps:
- Realize that you should try to research which parts of your breaker box are deadly in the first place
- Find the model number on the breaker box
- Google it, and sift through the results to find relevant information about which parts to touch/not touch
The mental loops you have to jump through would convince most people not to try at all, and just call up a professional. An annotated picture would be just as good, but having the hololens understand what you're looking at and the context of your situation (no doubt a difficult set of problems to solve) would make a huge difference.
Yes, those are all steps needed to get your AR glasses to superposed an annotated picture on top of your breaker box; unless you just postulate the glasses come with such software preinstalled and the manual for the box doesn’t have annotated pictures.
I think this is why MS is starting with the corp/industrial space. The comments I see here (for better or worse) do demonstrate the kind of up hill battle MS would experience when dealing with consumer critique and expectations.
I would postulate _exactly_ that the glasses would come with software preinstalled. Similar to how YouTube videos supplement so many instruction manuals today. Even then it's no directed primarily at the person that wants to repair a breaker box but instead the technician that would _install_ it. Though once the form factor is as ubiquitous as cell phones I'd imagine every support service will have an offering. I bet every Verizon tech would love to see exactly what Grandma is looking at when asked to reset her router. Which _then_ us to the opportunity for first responders to assist one another remotely. It's a value multiplier when we reduce time and increase quality in the same swing.
Look at the story about Azure Kinect helping to reduce hospital bed falls from 11,0000 a year to 0. We'll see similar reductions to: House fires do to rushed wiring jobs, defects in nearly any manufacturing process.
Remember that this is 'augmented' reality. What I hope isn't lost on folks is that the thing we're augmenting is ourselves. Granting a super human level of awareness and cognitive ability.
You sound pretty hyped about AR. The Hololens seems to have considerable shortcomings. But I agree that eventually, AR can do a lot of good. I believe that truly intelligent AR headsets have the ability to support e.g. certain cases of people with mental disorders enough in their daily lives to become much more independent and free. These devices operate in real world contexts and can record them, process them and act on them. For starters, imagine an assistant that remembers perfectly where you left your car keys or your glasses while you are still half asleep in the morning. In the long term, these devices can do much more. The flipside is that they need to have always on cameras and maybe always on micriphones to be useful. This has ramifications of its own.
Well, in my experience I was speaking to engineering firms which explained that metrics on their machinery would be visible from hundreds of metres just by looking at the structure. This vastly improves safety as it allows workers to see if there is hazards/dangers.
I really don't get the factory use case. What kind of productivity boost do people expect, that could make up for the cost of modeling, both up-front and continuous with every change to the physical setup? Make up for the cumulative cost of the extra delays incurred by adding an AR content maintenance team to the already long list of people you need to coordinate in the project plan when retooling for e.g. a new product? Making the few people left on a high tech high automation factory floor even more productive is an insubstantial gain compared to retooling latency. The former just happens to be easier to quantify, wages are neatly tallied in Excel or SAP, whereas missed opportunities don't appear in your imagination unless you actively think about them.
Maybe AR will be the missing building block that makes high tech manufacturing breach the complexity wall where things start to be getting easier, but without more compelling arguments for that side than I have seen so far I will continue suspect that it will just be the opposite of keeping it simple. (This is a general pair of polar opposites I like to use as a mental model in programming: either KISS or climb the complexity/abstraction mountain until it gets easier again - the problem is that you don't know in advance how high the mountain will be, how low the trough on the other side will be, could be higher, could be lower than the default state of KISS and that it is easy to get lost on the way up)
My brother (a welder) had to constantly correct design flaws by the architects and engineers involved so education is something but not everything. This ranged from having to "fix" the specified measurements to ordering more material because the highly educated apparently faltered on that note.
I mean that in the sense of being able to contact a specialist at your office if there is something you are unfamiliar with. For example, if I am an astronaut and a part fails, I can have someone direct me who designed it. In a more simple capacity, a mechanic can have support from an expert on a specific car.
