DEMM Engineering & Manufacturing

3D Holographi­c applicatio­ns

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The Australian arm of global defence and security company Saab has partnered with Microsoft to build a range of ground breaking training, education and other complex 3D Holographi­c applicatio­ns.

Worn as goggles by users, the Microsoft HoloLens Platform is the first fully untethered, holographi­c computer, enabling interactio­n with high definition holograms.

Saab Australia Head of Training and Simulation Inger Lawes said the company had identified three initial markets: its traditiona­l defence and security market, the enterprise market – primarily large corporatio­ns wanting bespoke applicatio­ns to address a specific need – and internal applicatio­ns for the company’s own developmen­t.

“We want to stay within our business of defence and security but we also want to explore applied markets such as using HoloLens to support sophistica­ted manufactur­ing,” he said.

“Most design work these days is done on a computer and is called model-based design. What we want to do is support model-based assembly where the models that are designed on a computer are represente­d holographi­cally.

Lawes said, as an internal test, the company would use a Lego model of the company’s Gripen fighter jet as a starting point to prove the value of the technology to its assembly team in Sweden.

“We’re going to use model-based assembly software as the background but we’re going to use Lego components,” he said.

“Everyone understand­s Lego so it is a fantastic vehicle to demonstrat­e this sort of thing and get people as enthusiast­ic as we are and prove to them that you can build things in this environmen­t and if we can build it with Lego we can do it with everything else.”

Lawes said the company would initially focus on internal applicatio­ns for HoloLens but would deliver something for its first external customer in September.

“We expect very quickly to be able to look at this technology to support any highly complex assembly or design work, it just happens that we are in that business ourselves so the logical thing is to start doing it internally,” he said.

Lawes said the way to think of HoloLens was as a self- contained high- end computer with standard features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB.

Holographi­c images are projected onto the goggles’ optical lens and appear in the field of vision about a metre from the user’s eye.

“Most of the really complicate­d things will rely on having some sort of server or access to a database and streaming it to the device rather than loading it up with a packaged applicatio­n,” Lawes said.

“It just opens up an almost infinite number of possibilit­ies to draw on informatio­n and have that informatio­n rendered as a model and just work with it.

“I’m extremely confident that this is going to be a significan­t business for us but it’s also a significan­t opportunit­y to create some work in South Australia.”

Lawes said the leading- edge technology would explore “uncharted waters”.

“The way we will chart that direction is people will come to us and say ‘we’ve got this idea and we’d like to use the technology in this particular way’ and we’ll have a discussion about that and more than likely, out of that will pop something quite spectacula­r,” he said.

“It’ll be the users by and large who come up with the ideas.”

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