Building Future Cities: "How Lockheed Martin is Using Augmented Reality"

As technology accelerates, so do the knowledge requirements for the workers. But what if someday you could put on glasses and know how to do something? FIRST strategic partner Lockheed Martin is among those innovating with augmented reality to reduce "information overhead" and improve accuracy. Will we one day see technology like this being used to build the cities of the future?

Engineering.com recently interviewed Lockheed Martin augmented-reality experts. Read or listen to the interview.

Quotes from "How Lockheed Martin is Using AR"

When building spacecraft, we need to be very cautious during the actions that we're taking in the manufacturing process. With 50% of the time being spent just on interpreting the data, our leadership gave it a name—information overhead—and we set a goal to optimize it

When the quality department is looking to verify component placement in assembly, AR is a very quick and easy way to do that and also when they verify the work instruction in advance, it's much quicker to do that through AR than to try to verify from traditional method

[Lockheed vendor:] For example, in clean facilities, where they make food products. With the high turnover of operator personnel, they’re fine doing their jobs day to day, but when something goes wrong and line breaks down, there's not really somebody on the line who knows how to fix it. In the old world somebody would be able to fix it, but they're not there in the clean room the entire time, so now they're somewhere else and the time from things going wrong, to the time that person can actually get on site, and start diagnosing it and fixing can lead to an extended period of downtime. Using our remote assistance application, the frontline technician simply calls up the expert, who is somewhere else, and can begin diagnosing it immediately after an error, and the expert quite often doesn't even need to come on site.

Read more on engineering.com.

Building Future Cities

This season, Disney, Lucasfilm, and FIRST have teamed up as part of the Star Wars: Force for Change philanthropic initiative. The season theme, FIRST RISE^SM, explores how humanity will build sustainable cities for our future. "Building Future Cities" (#BFC) is a digital campaign that showcases how FIRST strategic partners, allies, and community are already at work on the cities of tomorrow.