When critical infrastructure is built, large teams with different geographical locations build components that come together seamlessly. In reality, this is a messy back-and-forth between all these teams with a lot of rework.
In large infrastructure, each member of the team is like a cog-in-the-wheel with limited visibility into the end-goal or product. This ensures everybody across the board work cohesively in unison to execute the project successfully. Be it a bridge, an aircraft, or a powerplant, the ability to mobilise a large and diverse workforce to execute projects successfully requires the entire project broken into small processes. This decentralised approach with process-driven product building is by design and necessary for continuity, but it has the opposite effect of workers not understanding the end-product effectively to ensure quality every single time.
Let's take a bridge for example, the scale and weight of each girder varies and it is generally soo massive, it becomes difficult for us to wrap our heads around it. Things like scale and weight for each component is different, and it becomes close to impossible to get a perspective on it. This tends to make teams complacent due to underestimation of effort and associated risk leading to mistakes and safety hazards. How do we ensure engineers, operators, and technicians get a sense of scale of components, assemblies, and the final product?
In conjunction with a major infrastructure enterprise with subject matter expertise running into decades, we concluded that utilising the augmented reality capabilities (see-through) of wearable headsets will give employees a realistic sense of size and scale of components that is just not possible from screens, images, or videos.
To put the solution together, we look at two key components:
The aha! moment for viewers is when they start interacting with assemblies and components, understanding where their work fits in the bigger picture. Users get a sense of clarity that did not exist previously. These insights help them think of design engineering in 3D and identify ways to improve subsequent designs.
Critical infrastructure demand is rapidly growing in India, and interactive designs provide engineering organisations a order-of-magnitude improvement in employee productivity and morale. To goal is to create digital twins for all infrastructure in operations, in the design phase, and everything inbetween. By creating accessible CAD combined with processes, live data, and actionable insights in portable 3D, critical infrastructure management becomes digitised and intelligent for subsequent generations to follow and build upon them.
