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

Equinor (Norway, Oil industry) uses hololens.

https://loop.equinor.com/en/stories/shaping-the-future-with-...

https://loop.equinor.com/en/stories/developers-trip-johan-sv...

Yes. In the past I was working in a F500, one of the world leaders in energy services. They introduced VR to implement remote assistance and support for very remote places (like offshore platforms, oilfield in the middle of nowhere or in risky countries). A local operator will wear the VR and then a service engineer from HQ can drive him on diagnostic and troubleshooting. The service is immediate, as the engineer will not spend time on flight and they can save a lot of money. They also use the platform for training, saving time for the learners and avoiding to deploying huge and complex machineries just for training.

I saw it couple of time in action, it's really impressive.

There is at least one use case where I would want AR. I was doing some cable runs last night 30' in the air, and AR would have been very beneficial to highlight the exact path instead of spending a lot of time confirming and reconfirming with the team.

We’ve developed VR based industrial safety training, as a self-contained, portable product for blue collar workers in India - launched about 24 months ago with regular updates.

Multiple companies have bought it, and we have large companies as clients who’ve used it to train 1000s of their blue-collar workers, even in sectors such as construction in a relatively challenging (in terms of pricing and value) market.

We have a significant (I think!) number of devices deployed, and most of my clients end up purchasing more after the initial purchase and pilot.

I think that’s for a few reasons:

1) VR, when well designed, can offer 1st person experience of being an accident victim due to the viewer’s own oversight / someone else’s oversight. That makes it a far more effective way to draw the learner’s attention to the importance of the safety protocols, etc.

2) Our solution is multi-lingual: it’s currently available in 10 regional Indian languages - that matters, since a significant fraction of the workforce may not understand English. Our localisation extends beyond that, but language is a big thing in enabling access and usage.

3) if you have to invest 10-15 min per learner (often one-on-one as the instructor) to onboard each learner before they can use your solution, it becomes very difficult to scale and raises the bar for cost-effectiveness. So that’s something we focus on heavily.

4) Setup time- don’t create a solution that requires IT support, someone who understands how to setup / load SteamVR / Oculus Link / meta Horizon. If the solution adds 20-30 min workload to the staff on a site, then adopting it becomes that much more painful - so we’ve worked very hard to develop an integrated system where the instructor can quickly onboard 10-15 learners and get going with the session in 5 min.

5) workflow changes: often, introducing VR means changing some part of the organisation’s workflow - many VR solutions don’t consider this / acknowledge this in their design- clients get initially excited, but when it comes to actually using it on a daily basis, the deployment and workflow frictions can completely tank VR adoption.

I’ve seen multiple solutions fail because of this, and we focus extensively on this when we design our solutions.

India is a hard market for VR, honestly because it’s very price sensitive. But I think we’ve made some progress here, because we’ve focused extensively on system robustness, ease of deployment, localization, and a lot of user-centered design.

We’ve also developed sophisticated VR - based training solutions for SOP training. VR can be / is, very effective for initial onboarding and SOP training. Again, the challenge here is usability - most of the learner’s don’t know how to use the controllers. Learning how to use the controllers is not easy and takes time. So that onboarding is critical and needs to be done well.

In SOP training, our experience is that it can, if designed well, significantly reduce on-boarding time; however, you still need the last 20% of training on the actual thing for it to stick, and for the learner to actually _learn_.

Edit: formatting and word choice

I am currently traveling and for the past few weeks have been using an Oculus 3 with Immersed (https://immersed.com/). Pleasantly surprised how usable it is for 3-6 hour stretches, more productive than just a laptop screen alone. At home I'll likely return to physical monitors though.

Tips: Get an upgraded headband, silicone face cover and carrying case. Use a physical USB connection for lower latency (& turn off the wifi/bluetooth as it's no longer needed). Bring a cloth for keeping the lenses clean. Bump the Retina quality up in the Immersed client (on Mac). Lower resolutions (1920x1080) are more comfortable to use over longer periods. Use a travel neck pillow for reclined usage. Bring replacement batteries and a charger for the controllers.