Playing a game, watching a movie, hailing a ride…phones open the door to plenty of possibilities, including augmented and virtual reality training (AR/VR).
While it may be a while before greasy shop manuals and keyboards are a thing of the past, Design Interactive proved once again that AR/VR training is a viable technology especially for busy shops where a supervisor may not be able to always drop everything to help a rookie.
Monday night at the Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) Annual Meeting & Transportation Technology Exhibition in Atlanta, Ga., Design Interactive announced that its augmented reality training solution, Augmentor, is now available on Android and iOS mobile devices.
And seeing is believing. James Morgan, product manager for Design Interactive, demonstrated how the technology works on a worn-out tire. Similar to scanning a QR code, Morgan scanned a tag on top of the tire and the phone went to work displaying information relevant to that tire.
“So now you can see that there are virtual pins on top of that tire. There are three steps here: Step 1, step 2 and step 3 that all have different types of content,” Morgan explained.
Images, video, audio, written instructions—whatever’s been recorded in advance for that particular tire—can now be accessed for reference and used in diagnostics.
“Let’s say your truck is pulling to the left. Well, we have ways of diagnosing that where you can actually go through and find out different reasons as to why it may be pulling to the left,” Morgan said.
Augmentor is designed to not only make training more convenient, it’s geared towards lowering training costs.
“With the new ability to use Augmentor on mobile devices, fleets can deploy our transportation focused training solutions more quickly and effectively to their technicians,” said Matt Johnston, division head of commercial solutions for Design Interactive. “Now, content like procedures and troubleshooting methods can be accessed from mobile phones across individual shops and multiple maintenance locations. With this mobile application, fleets can use our augmented reality and video- and computer-based technologies to train technicians for a lower cost.”
