Ask HN: Anyone using augmented reality, VR, glasses, helmets etc. in industry?

Talk to an architect. (The kind that designs buildings, not software.) Last I knew a decade ago there were already early adopters from that field making daily professional use of VR. Mostly for showing clients the concept, I believe.

I worked in a firm for ~6 years and there was very little design work done in VR. It was all client presentations and some clients were very adverse to wearing the headset themselves. They wanted to watch on a monitor as a team member explored the virtual building.

The adoption of it in various industries for training is larger than most people might suspect. First responders and retailers have some of the largest internal deployments out there, but they aren’t massively publicized (most people would never guess who’s fielding the largest fleet of headsets right now). That said, it’s still not mass adoption.

At the end of the day, you are asking someone to put something on their face that is still very different ergonomically than glasses (and I’m not sure even glasses would overcome enough friction). The ROI has to overcome the business (or personal) friction of buying the hardware, the friction of the form factor plus any friction from changed workflows.

Now put that in an operational workflow instead of training and the risks go up. Most are still skeptical of device reliability (not to say there aren’t suitable devices for operational roles but the perception is still a hurdle, and the applicability is often device-specific). Now add on to that limited experience with devices (many decision makers have never put one on), added security complications, specialized software development skills, limited content libraries and very real accessibility concerns and a lot of enterprises can never get past an “innovation center demo.”

For many industries the value proposition just isn’t there yet. But that said, I’d recommend digging a little deeper as there’s a lot of existing use-cases and deployments, both failed and successful, outside of IVAS.

I've gone down this rabbit hole with customers as a PM still working in the space. Here is what I've learned. The past decade of devices (hololens, realwear, google glass, vuzix, etc) were some combination of way too heavy, expensive, fragile, short battery life, no wifi connectivity, too much UI long to get to point of value and/or simply not useful. That and most customers had a content problem. The AR/VR use in the field typically came down to looking something up in a manual or calling someone. Both easily and perhaps more effectively done on a smartphone. There was an instance where I asked techs why they weren't using the headset for showing what they were seeing in realtime and they said, it's easier to facetime (hard to argue that). The cool AR 3-D demos or overlays rarely worked in the field on real equip or didn't actually convey anything useful (everyone knows the basics of how the machine works). There are training VR use cases (like learning to operate a crane), but once again it's a nice to have supplement and not a replacement. Recent advances with LLMs (specifically voice) + Meta type "glasses form factor" have created intrigue again with innovation centers at large companies. The use case we're currently working on is inspections or filling out forms with audio/videos.

I’m one of the founders @ resolvebim.com YCW15. We built a VR and (some) AR platform to help engineering and construction companies use HMDs in their everyday workflows to enhance their 3D BIM review workflows.

We post case studies regularly on our blog, so you can read about real world deployments there: blog.resolvebim.com

From my experience the hardware is still a hurdle simply because it doesn’t completely replace all pc based workflows right now and therefore has to be used selectively at the right moments alongside 2D monitors.