Industrial Designers, this is your AR time!
Up to 10 times faster to market
No less than 5 to 10 times faster to market, this is what major automotive and aircraft manufacturers achieve using Augmented Reality (AR) for design review and quality assurance, as recently pointed out by Harvard Business Review’s A Manager’s Guide to Augmented Reality.
Unfortunately, as of now, AR remains a technology “for the few” not the many in the product design industry. While the VW-and-the-likes have already harnessed AR technologies in their product development processes, the vast majority of the Industrial Designers working for product development consultancies or small to mid-size manufacturers are still far from there. Mobile-AR has the opportunity to change this.
When design review is a hassle
What pushes for AR in the product design field? Mainly the long turnaround of reviewing a design with 2D renderings or other design vectors.
2D renderings are the norm when performing design reviews, conveying on the one hand a high-end image of a design concept but, on the other hand a flat, static picture, often not at scale, all of this leaving room for mistakes that pop-up late in the design process. From another perspective, an Industrial Designer recently pointed this out to me: “One of the biggest current struggle of communicating with clients and stakeholders in a design project, especially when you’re working remotely, is that you need to send files back-and-forth multiple times and mark-up in 2D.”
Overall there’s a contradiction: Industrial Designers build high-end 3D models, but when comes the time of sharing, they are limited to the 2-D windows of their computer screens which makes it hard to fully conceptualize designs and exchange iteractively around them with customers, coworkers, etc.
What about other design review supportings?
- 3D animations: those video-like renderings requires much effort to prepare and still are a 2D output, with no freedom of investigation for the reviewer
- Professional 3D printing: has a long turnaround due to the usual bottlenecks at printing shops and the time to get the 3D prints produced and shipped. Even more: 3D print is for the shape, material isn’t represented.
- Virtual Reality: mostly used for in-depth design reviews not day-to-day ones i.e. when your customer has 15 minutes to provide you with feedbacks. Plus it requires a VR headset and the necessary know-how to use it.
From 2D renderings, to 3D animation, 3D printing or VR, Industrial Designers still seem to miss a proper way to get the day-to-day design reviews performed, when your stakeholders only have a few minutes but you still need precise input to move ahead.
This is where AR steps in, and more specifically this is where mobile-AR can make a difference.
Mobile-AR makes design reviews 2.0
For the context, with Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore millions of smartphones recently turned into AR devices nearly overnight. This is a game-changer for anyone working in the 3D industry, and more specifically it will help designers quickly validate 3D concepts with their stakeholders and remove the pains of design reviews.
How? The right combination of technology can make a difference:
- On the one hand, Augmented Reality brings your 3D model right here in front of you, as if it was real, at any scale, in any environment.
- On the other hand, mobile makes it anytime, anywhere, for anyone — literally any of your stakeholder has a smartphone, high chances are that they now have AR-enabled ones.
Now, combine both together, and add 3D collaboration capabilities — think the WhatsApp, Skype, Slack with embedded 3D — , this makes a collaboration tool not only displaying a close to real hologram of your design, but allowing for faster and easier iterations around 3D concepts with anyone in the team.
What would it look like? Two illustrations, first is Augmented Review with a piece of furniture displayed in AR via a Google Pixel 2, and its positioning of precisely located annotation, second is Thingworx Studio’s AR design review concept.
To conclude and paraphrase the current mantra in the AR world: “[Industrial Designers], this is [your] AR time”. Yes, AR has been around, it may have been unaffordable, inaccessible, or even “gadget” in the past, but it is now being modeled to your own use-cases such as design reviews, and notably promises game-changing time-to-market.
Stay tuned. More to come.
