Boeing, the largest aerospace company on the planet, builds a lot of planes. The organization manufactures aircraft for airlines and governments in more than 150 countries. And every one of those planes contains thousands of wires that connect its various electrical systems.
这些复杂的电线不编织自己的网, and putting all the parts together is a monumental task. Each week, thousands of Boeing's U.S. workers construct "wire harnesses," or "people-size portions of the electrical systems" designed to help them join the various shapes and sizes of wires, according to Kyle Tsai, a research and development (R&D) engineer with Boeing Research and Technology (BRT), the company's central R&D organization. "Wire harnesses are very complex and very dense, and the technicians have to use what are, in essence, roadmaps to find the attachment points and connector pins," Tsai says. "There are so many that it can be information overload at times."
[Related:Google Glass is alive and well in the enterprise]
Today, Boeing wire-harness techs mostly use PDF-based assembly instructions on laptops to help them find the appropriate wires, cut them to size and then connect the components via wire harnesses. Techs must constantly shift their attention back and forth between on-screen roadmaps and harnesses. And they use alotof CTRL+F keyboard commands to find specific wire numbers, which means techs have to frequently use their hands to manipulate computers and navigate wire documentation.
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A Boeing technician works on a lengthy aircraft wiring system.
For 20 years, Boeing had been looking for a hands-free system that used some sort of wearable computer to reduce production time and related errors. The company experimented with an augmented reality (AR) application and "head-mounted, see-through display" called the Navigator 2 as early as 1995, according to the 2008 bookApplication Design for Wearable Computing。但是，有效和负担得起的硬件只是不存在......直到谷歌发布了其玻璃smartglasses。在过去，“一切都被硬件限制：电池寿命，屏幕，重量，”根据杰森DeStories，另一个R＆d工程师BRT。“现在，我们正处在一个时代，硬件已经不再是制约因素。”
Smartglasses下车波音地面
当谷歌发布第一玻璃“探索者版”在2013年的秋天，DeStories说，他的经理购买了一些早期smartglasses，并要求他开始摆弄，看看玻璃可能是公司所需的硬件。
In early 2014, DeStories and his team got to work on a demo application designed specifically for wireless harness assembly. The challenge, according to DeStories: "How do we get that information to the technician right at the time they're doing it, in the shortest manner possible, with the simplest user input?" The goal was to "reduce [technician's] time from intent to action," he says.
Brian Sacco
It didn't take long to come up with a barebones Glass app, and DeStories and his crew started to slowly show it to small groups of wire harness techs. The Glass app was a hit and served as a proof of concept.
那年晚些时候，内部波音通讯详细介绍了倡议，号召“项目剑圣”，并在全公司提请注意。“这引起了一大堆的兴趣，” DeStories说。“这真的迫使我们退后一步，实现我们需要的企业解决方案，而不仅仅是这个一次性的应用程序。”
Juggernaut meets Skylight
采取项目剑圣到一个新的水平，波音公司必须找到玻璃连接到其线束数据库和拉实时必要信息的安全，可靠的方式。
"Boeing put a competitive RFP [request for proposal] out into the market that I'm sure all of the玻璃在工作伙伴heard about," says Brian Ballard, CEO and cofounder ofAPX Labs，的制造商Skylightenterprise platform for smartglasses and a2016 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer公司。“他们在他们的制造过程中所描述的痛点，我们看到它，就像，‘哦，这正是我们所能做的。’我们开始竞标为它赢得了工作。”
[Related:How Google Glass could still see consumer success]
波音公司和APX实验室开始工作，天窗在2015年初整合，根据巴拉德，三月和十一月，DeStories和他的团队之间前往各个波音位置和显示玻璃的应用程序的早期离线版本，以确定是否没有这个概念会经不起推敲的线束地板。该小组还做了一个内部的培训活动约20人，预计一些推回。“掉那些20人，也许两个人没有那么兴奋，”他说。“其余的人激动地使用它，它拿起相当快。”
It was clear, that "across the board, it was going to work," according to DeStories.
Putting Glass to work on Boeing wire harnesses
在试点期间，当参与者出现了工作她第一次访问一个密码箱签出玻璃单元，然后去她的计算机登录和验证网络上的设备，根据DeStories。对于身份验证，高科技的人对smartglasses和扫描通过她的电脑，然后推线束应用到smartglasses对系统生成的QR码。其次，技术将前往她的工作台上组装车间，抓住下一个“车间订单”，然后扫描上的组件中，它提供了必要的状态更新或票据，并告诉她开始在那里另一个QR代码，DeStories说。
A Boeing technician working on a wire harness using Google Glass and the Skylight
天窗的应用支持触摸手势和语音命令，这样一个技术可以，例如，拿起组件的框，然后说，开始的过程“OK天窗。开始线束。扫描顺序。”接下来，她会说：“OK天窗，本地搜索，0447，”快速启动组装路线图号0447线对她smartglasses抬头显示器。
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如果她遇到了一个问题，她没能解决她自己，她就会滔滔不绝线束她点的视图视频专家寻求协助另一个位置。或者她可以检查，看看是否有其他程序集的视频已经可用于显示的SmartGlass上播放。
"When you truly sit in the pilot seat, from the technicians point of view, having a hands-free device where the information is just always in the upper right corner of your eye really starts to make sense," DeStories says.