Reactor — Mixed Reality platform for aviation maintenance
Enabled with the object recognition it intertwines physical and digital worlds allowing the user to steer the virtual by changing the real.
About Company
Spiral Technology is on the mission to change the working environment of engineers in aviation maintenance. No matter how senior the technician is, to repair an aircraft engine he needs continuous access to multiple manuals, instructions, and job cards. Current industry standard is to keep all this data in thousand-page long pdf books full of 2-dimensional drawings which are hard to read or even on paper.
About Product
We are building Reactor — the Mixed Reality Platform for Microsoft HoloLens which will bring necessary technical knowledge right in front of the eyes of a technician at the right time.
Working hand in hand with engineers and practitioners from MRO industry for 9 months we developed a range of prototypes which are now being tested and scaled in real MRO and components manufacturing facilities.
Engineers are the backbone of any MRO shop therefore we believe that giving them better and more powerful tools will impact the bottom line through the whole operational value chain starting from junior training and basic inspections to the sophisticated repair, overhaul, and testing.
Main features of the Reactor
Contextual manuals and documentation
Platform delivers all necessary technical knowledge right in front of the eyes of an engineer
Personnel training and testing
Senior expert can remotely supervise junior engineer correcting mistakes on the spot
Deep insights
3D holograms overlaying the physical objects extend vision to the inside processes and structural design
Complex tasks
Animated process tutorials allow to perform the sophisticated disassembly procedures even to a junior technician
Work in progress
Scaling up content
We entered an active phase of development focusing on adding new parts and components of an engine as well as expanding the interface. For example, we’ve created the functionality to attach component callout with the description and pictures of a selected part of the engine, and applied it to the engine Oil Tank:
Each callout can also store the video tutorial and allow video and photo capturing. This toolkit is aimed at enhancing the decision-making power of the engineers performing maintenance and supercharging technical training.
Click without focusing on anything
There is a special mode in which the user can click without pointing the cursor on anything clickable. It is designed for advancing through the instruction list and for inspections — where it adds the maximum convenience.
Click on a real object
Once the real object recognized any its part is becoming an active UI element. The user can zoom on it or change its state depending on the context.
Photo catalog and picture taking
Now any of the engine parts can have its own image gallery with the full functionality to manage it: delete, add new or take an actual picture. It would be most useful for all kinds of inspections and quality assurance procedures. Next step would be to add the voice to text notes.
Work order instructions for manufacturing
Often the manufacturing instructions are extensive and differentiated in nature containing text descriptions, photos, tables, quality checks, etc. We created the layout and the functionality for such cases. The instruction layers could be expanded almost infinitely to the right-hand side and collapsed after being processed.
