NGRAIN, the Vancouver-based company that makes the software, claims that the combination of these glasses and their software allows engineers to work 30 percent faster, and with accuracy up to 96 percent. Those numbers are huge for a company like Lockheed Martin. If even one F-35 fighter jet needs additional repairs and can't be sold or deployed, that costs the manufacturer big piles of money.
Using augmented reality on fighter jets means that people with a minimum amount of training can do their jobs consistently well, which translates to less cost and time for training. By doing, rather than just listening in a classroom or reading a manual, the retention of knowledge doubles. "[It's] the difference is between passively observing and actively doing," says Barry Po, director of product management at NGRAIN.
AR also accelerates the repair process. This system builds on tablet software that NGRAIN built for Lockheed to replace pen-and-paper notation. It allowed engineers to annotate a 3D model of the plane, meaning repairs that'd take days now take hours. With the glasses, those annotations can appear in a person's field of view. "Lockheed wants to make it so that when people walk into the environment," Po says, "they have all the information right before their eyes." The extra advantage of the glasses? "[They] free up the hands of the people who are doing the job."
The AR glasses are still in trial mode on the Lockheed factory floor. Getting this technology onto military bases, where Lockheed technicians handle repairs to keep the planes battle-ready, will be slightly more difficult. The military doesn't allow cameras on those bases, so the front-facing optical sensor is currently verboten.