[SkiFreeWin3]

Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.

I’m a skeptic on the consumer side of this being a runaway hit like smartphones.

Enterprise and industrial and the trades use cases in physical space is big.

[YuechenLi]

You should be skeptical of industrial use case as well. Allowing any device with internet access and a camera on it onto the floor of most electronics manufacturing facility is a nonstarter, phones, smart glasses, or anything of that sort. The other thing is, smart glasses buy nothing over having PCs/assembly line machines with screens for HMI, and standard operating procedures can be printed on paper. Also, if you are actually an operator on an assembly line, wearing these glasses for 10 hours a day is the last thing you want at your job.

The case for them gets even worse for heavy manufacturing industry/trades, since you have to think about safety and liability now: what if these smart glasses fall into the machines and cause an accident? Can these smartglasses can withstand the environmental conditions in the workshop?

[Terr_]

Industrial use-cases could end up as fundamentally different product, ex:

* Guiding someone through a complex assembly, it's going to be on pretty much all shift, with effects on thermal management and battery capacity.

* You'll want to swap batteries so that it can be used by another shift, which will take priority over fashion.

* It may also need to incorporate positioning markers and QR codes and external sensor data from a particular environment, sometimes taking preference over any general object recognition.

* Facial recognition won't figure very much.

* Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.

* Little to no tolerance for letting the vendor have footage or vague "telemetry" when trade secrets are involved.

In other words, it's like kind of like how the design/use/adoption of freight trains isn't necessarily indicative of the design/use/adoption of pickup trucks. Sure, they both move large things on wheels using diesel power, but...

[dylan604]

> * Ruggedness and repairability may be prioritized over miniaturization.

repairability? in what trend are you seeing that being a thing? they'll just make you buy an expensive warranty/insurance plan for replacements. i really don't see tech allowing for repairability

[hdndjsbbs]

Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.

[vitally3643]

Industrial and consumer electronics are entirely different industries. Industry isn't typically tolerant of the kind of extended warranty bullshit runaround that consumer brands employ.

For an industrial customer, your thing either needs to be repairable right NOW or it needs to be cheap enough that you can have disposable stock on hand. If your delicate widget can only be repaired by hand-delivering it to nude virgins on a mountaintop, you are not getting that 500k unit contract, you're getting shown to the door.

That is unless you're literally IBM and/or have monopolized your class of utterly indespensible widget. Only then do you have the power to tell Amazon to fuck off and send a warranty claim.

[type0]

I think something like this might be implemented as part of the helmet for jobs that require it, definitely not built into glasses that will likely always be ridiculous just like riding penny-farthing is kinda ridiculous now.

[merelysounds]

In the long run it could spread from commercial to consumer scenarios; perhaps extra fast if there was adoption in the services sector.

[cadamsdotcom]

Are you sure?

Wasn’t HoloLens (from Microsoft) squarely aimed at this use case? What went wrong there?

[contingencies]

I disagree. The idea humans will be in the loop and the best way to accelerate things is to teach them slightly faster is fundamentally flawed. Future industrial will be automated, the only humans who will need comprehension will be the maintenance staff or management, and they will have familiarity and/or alternate tooling rendering glasses a noncritical value add at best.

By the time that rolls around, this stuff will be available for cents on the dollar, just as Shenzhen showrooms were full of AR/VR hardware in 2015 and the industry has gone nowhere for 30+ years.

[quickthrowman]

It would be amazing to be able to look at an equipment nameplate and pull up a cutsheet, installation and operations manual, etc.

[01100011]

I can already do that with my phone and google lens. I don't have to strap extra crap to my face or let a device spy on everything I see.

[quickthrowman]

That’s a good point, my electricians already have iPads and are wearing eye protection. I’ll have to check out Google lens, thanks!

[reaperducer]

Industrial use cases will be huge once software+AI are firing on all cylinders.

Industry has had entire VR rooms since at least the 1990's, when I saw one in use.

AR glasses are toys compared to what the big oil companies have been using to visualize underground strata since before Facebook et.al. even existed.

Pretending that they're going to revolutionize the industrial space is just grasping at straws to justify a gadget that nobody other than tech bros and perverts want.