COVER STORY | AUGMENTED REALITY
This made using AR ideal for
removing a lot of the dangers, by
virtually placing a ventilator expert
into a partner factory – thus reducing
the risk of the virus spreading.
“We quickly became aware
of was the need to minimise the
number of people on site,” says Paul
Haimes. “So that’s where I think
augmented reality really added a
huge amount of value as it meant we
could capture what these experts
were doing and provided that
information really right in the eld
of view of these new operators. But
we did it without having to put those
experts in the factories with these
new operators. And from a crosscontamination
perspective, that was
really important. And the consortium
was very, very strict really on the
fact that it was only ever going to
be one PTC person that was going
to be on site doing the work. There
was a team of people backing the
PTC of ces who were supporting
that individual, but it was going be
that one person that was there in the
factory.”
By its nature, this was a process
with an extremely constrained
timeframe. Just how quickly PTC
was able to work to produce the AR
experiences is eye-opening. Says
Paul Haimes: “If we look at the Smith
Medical ParaPac 300, which is the
smaller of the two ventilators, the
assembly process for that was 24
hours. We had to capture all of that,
which was done over the course
of, I think a day and a half or two
days. We then had a few days of post
processing, where we used our edit
suite to splice together the video that
documents that sort of speech content
and so forth. And then it would be
ready for publishing straight away.
So you’re talking about something
that was done in a matter of days that
could ordinarily have taken weeks or
weeks to do under normal working
conditions.”
This project represented
uncharted territory for PTC, since
it meant working on a scale with
AR that it had never tried before.
“This ventilator challenge has been
the biggest thing we’ve ever done
with AR – it representes the largest
number of AR experiences we’ve
ever deployed inside PTC. So it goes
beyond what we’ve done with any
sort of regular customer regular
manufacturer scheme.”
The success of PTC’s work has
signi cant rami cations for the
technology as a whole. According
to Haimes: “This has gone way up
into the thousands of experiences
delivered. That for us is fantastic. It’s
a great story. And then again, there
have been no scalability challenges..
there is some proof of its resilience
“But I think what this has showed
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