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Back a few years ago, I had built an "industrial equipment guided-repair" app for the Microsoft HoloLens. We decked out an air compressor with with IoT-enabled
by moron4hire 5y ago
Back a few years ago, I had built an "industrial equipment guided-repair" app for the Microsoft HoloLens. We decked out an air compressor with with IoT-enabled sensors for various things (the specifics don't matter as it was just a demo, but it was stuff like temperature, vibration, etc.). The app used 3D object recognition and overlayed live sensor data, graphs of historic data, disassembly explosion animations, and step-by-step guides for performing maintenance (e.g. replacing air filters, lubricating components).
It was such a great use case for AR. The app even won a few small awards.
Then the word came from on high that we needed to redo everything on the iPad. Ultimately, it came down to the parent company of the company I worked for having Microsoft as an auditing client and Apple as a technology partner. So we weren't "allowed" to have a relationship with Microsoft (even though one of the point of not being directly in the parent company was to shield us from those conflict of interest concerns) and we were being directed to demonstrate a relationship with Apple.
Switching to having the tablet in one hand and trying to do things with the air compressor with the other was hot garbage. We had a thing that was glitzy and fun and and useful and then completely threw away every bit of substance in the app.
I tried so many different input modalities with the iPad to try to salvage some semblence of usefulness out of it, including camera-based hand-tracking. You could basically only comfortably view data. Any level of interaction directly with the machine was gone. Worst of all, people concurrently using the app from different devices kept running into each other because they were so tunnel-visioned by the tablet.
I don't think I've ever been so professionally disappointed in my career.