XR serves as an engine of progress in managing car repairs
This article is part of XR Frontiers, a publication focused on the intersection of extended reality and business reality.
The mandate to bring XR glasses to Mitchell International, a company that serves as a hub among the parties involved in auto insurance claims and repairs, grew out of technology proliferation itself. For decades, explains Jack Rozint, the company’s VP of sales and service, car repair was relatively consistent across makes and models. But the proliferation of advanced sensor-driven features such as lane guidance and other ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) has created an avalanche of documentation that technicians need to understand in order to fix vehicles.
Even understanding how to fix a 2019 model may have limited relevance in fixing the 2020 version of the same vehicle. And as ever more technology pervades the vehicle, the volume of information needed for repairs is only poised to grow.
The old technique used by techs, which consisted of heading over to a terminal, looking up a procedure, and trying to memorize as much of it as possible before returning to the workspace, was becoming overwhelming. Enter smart glasses. The ability to display documentation right in the field of view of technicians working on damaged vehicles has led to dramatic improvements in the speed and accuracy of their work.
A technician or an insurance adjuster would need to maybe study 5,000 pages of documentation and then they’d be able to virtually work on any year make or model of vehicle ten years ago. That number of documentation pages now is in the tens of millions.
— Jack Rozint, VP, Sales and Service, Mitchell International
According to Rozint, Mitchell had experimented with tablets for keeping the information closeby. However, even ruggedized tablets often didn’t survive the many dangers around a repair facility. They could be lost or misplaced, something less likely to happen with a device attached to your head. So earlier this year, the company joined the Qualcomm Enterprise XR Program that I wrote about in September. Mitchell has found that having the device within such close range of the technician facilitates the use of voice commands to call up documentation on demand. And smart glasses allow technicians to have their hands free, reducing friction between research and work. That’s particularly important for instances in which repair staff may want to engage in a video chat session in order to get advice from someone remote.
Compared to sophisticated 3D holograms that float and respond to touch before your eyes, thetext, graphics and even video filling these smart glasses at work may seem mundane. But many enterprise XR headset vendors stress the need for sharp, clear text as a key feature in today’s products. It is, after all, the medium that contains a vast amount of collective knowledge within an enterprise. In one of Microsoft’s Hololens 2 demos, for example, the company shows how its eye-tracking allows wearers to control the scrolling of text simply by directing their eyes toward the top or bottom of a floating page.
We took these glasses out and did our proof of concept. The complexity of vehicles today is so overwhelming to the people responsible for processing claims and executing collision repairs. They’re just hungry for solutions to help with this need of getting information quickly and this does such a good job of doing it. The reaction has been unlike anything I’ve seen in 25 years.
— Jack Rozint, VP, Sales and Service, Mitchell International
Rozint, though, sees the arrival of contextual holograms and instructions arriving in the near future, fueled by the maturity of design tools and the inentives that the car manufacturers have to create such aids. This could prove useful, for example, in distinguishing different parts of an engine that can often appear similar. In the aftermath of auto accidents, extended reality technologies are driving the process to get cars back on the road and quantifying the costs to do so.
Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and a contributor to ZDNet and Fast Company. He is also co-host of the Techspansive podcast. You can follow him on Twitter at @rossrubin.
