Sure, augmented reality (A/R) is great for field service and support. It s also an amazingly productive tool for engineering, prototyping, manufacturing, sales, and marketing.
If you or your company is considering and evaluating A/R, the chances are pretty good that the implementation you are investigating is field service. And no one who understands A/R will tell you that that you should not be looking at A/R for field service. Deploying the company's knowledge, the company's data, its processes, its most fundamental expertise into the field with its people on the ground makes those employees more productive. It makes their results more reliable. It can save the company very significant costs.
If you talk to people who are experts in industrial A/R, they can tell you about usage models which include, yes, field service and maintenance, but also include prototyping, production, control systems, training, sales, and marketing. In talking with Diota, a French start-up specialized in industrial augmented reality solutions, PW was presented with multiple use-case scenarios ... all of which were in development or deployment at one single customer.
It's not a game, it's a game-changer
The French automotive company, PSA, which is known for the iconic Peugeot and Citroen car brands, is extremely interested in A/R. At the Laval Virtual event in France this year, the company showed and discussed usage models for A/R in prototyping, production, maintenance, and sales.
A good example in automotive for using A/R in prototyping was on display in the Diota booth. A structural car console was being used to show how A/R could be applied to the world of design and prototyping. PSA presented their recent experiences in applying A/R to production - augmented reality used in the paint-production line, and A/R applied to sales - a full-scale car configuration application running in a PSA showroom.
Partnerships are critical for start-up companies
When your company is a fresh start-up with a disruptive technology which needs to provide industrial-strength solutions to major players in industry, then your company needs to cooperate with partners. Diota is no different. During the Laval Virtual, the engineering experts from Segula were present with PSA during the Diota presentations. A partner such as Segula is critical to the success of an industrial A/R implementation because they have domain expertise and the ability to feed the A/R system with data. An augmented reality solution is nothing without useful, pertinent data to drive it.
The PW perspective :
Optimizing company processes is a continuous challenge. Moments arrive when a new technology provides the possibility to make a significant jump in efficiency and productivity. And companies like PSA which seize these moments and embrace new technology and processes give themselves a window of time where they can gain a competitive advantage. Such is the case with augmented reality. PSA, like many industrial companies need a robust, and accurate A/R system in order to apply A/R on a large scale and across multiple disciplines. A solution like Diota's appears to meet that need.
Please take five minutes to check out the video and to learn more about this project directly from Diota, PSA, and Segula.
