Porsche Brings AR To U.S. Car Repairs With ODG Smartglasses

Porsche is bringing augmented reality to U.S. car repairs for the first time at scale exclusively at its dealerships across the country. Porsche Cars North America will start rolling out the Tech Live Look to its 189 dealers in the country this week. The system is going to connect dealership technicians to remote experts through smartglasses for live interactions that the company says have the ability to reduce service resolution times by up to 40 percent.

The Tech Live Look system is based on the ODG (Osterhout Design Group) R-7 smartglasses and the AiR Enterprise software platform from Atheer, Inc. It fuses computerized eyewear and augmented reality software to enable remote experts hundreds of miles away to see what a service technician is seeing and provide feedback while the technician works on the problem completely hands-free.

Prior to this technology being in place, a complex technical issue would take a long time to resolve as the dealership technicians and the Porsche support team would go back and forth repeatedly through messages, phone calls, photos, and on-site visits by Porsche’s Field Technical Managers just to identify the issue before it could be fixed.

That chain of communication is substantially shortened by Tech Live Look. Porsche piloted the system last year and it will now go live at three of the company’s 189 dealers in the U.S. this week. Porsche aims to have the system live at 75 dealers by the end of this year with the remainder being covered next year.

Osterhout Design Group, the company that made these smartglasses, will be demonstrating its technology at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara. Attendees can stop by booth #319 to experience the R-7 smartglasses that Porsche is rolling out today as well as a multi-user and collaborative experience showcasing its R-8 and R-9 devices through a game of HORSE. The demo is meant to highlight the devices’ head tracking technology and other capabilities.

It will also showcase its innovative flight safety solution that is meant to help pilots in emergency landing situations if there’s smoke filled in the cockpit. The ‘Smoked Assured Vision Enhanced Display’ or SAVED smartglasses combine technology with an oxygen mask and connect the plane’s heads-up display and cameras mounted on the outside to the smartglasses to give pilots a clear line of sight even when the cockpit’s filled with smoke.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Augmented Reality (AR), porsche, smartglasses