Volvo Engineers Using HoloLens to Improve Vehicle Development

Top executives at Volvo have gotten turned on to a new way of developing their most sophisticated cars in the S Series - Augmented Reality. Volvo is renowned for producing many of the safest and most utilitarian vehicles on Earth. In recent years the company has added performance and luxury to their skill set and have enjoyed considerable success in so doing.

As any engineer knows, the mental work of visualizing the exceedingly complex internal components and moving parts in modern vehicles can be quite taxing. Worse, even those with a talent for visualizing complex visual objects still have to figure out a way to share what they see in their mind’s eye- which means they have to learn to draw or work with 3D modeling software. It’s a significant barrier to communication in research and development departments.

Well, Volvo believes it has a solution to the problem, Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, the HoloLens. HoloLens consists of a headset with a complex set of lenses, displays, and of course- microprocessors, which displays virtual objects within a three-dimensional space all around the head the user.

In terms of ordinary office use, the HoloLens can display a practically unlimited amount of virtual desktops for the user, displaying them at any point in the room. This can eliminate the need for physical monitors, as each desktop essentially works like a separate computer monitor. That creates a huge amount of capability just in the realm of ordinary office work. But that isn’t what’s got Volvo executives excited.

What’s got them excited is HoloLens’ ability to display three-dimensional objects at any point in a room and persistently display them in the same location no matter what the user does. For example, you may create a fully animated 3D object, set in on your physical desk between your keyboard and your coffee cup. Now, turn your head and look back rapidly, the virtual object will still be in the same place undisturbed. This can be used for labeling objects in the real world. To be blunt- it augments reality.

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Given a sufficiently powerful computer with enough USB ports for numerous engineers working on the same mechanical problem- Volvo imagines using HoloLens to create fully virtual versions of the vehicles it intends to design, develop, and enhance. Engineers will be able to visualize, say, a fuel injection system while in operation from the outside or inside at any angle. Theoretically speaking, they should be able to blow the 3D rendering up to enormous sizes and stand within tiny chambers while observing how fluids, gasses, and complex mechanical components work in action. They can slow down the mechanical processes they wish to observe to study minute details, or they can speed a process up to see how much wear and tear a carburetor takes over the course of a month under specific conditions.

Volvo believes they will be able to reduce production times for new vehicles from thirty to twenty months using HoloLens to collaborate on design- and they also believe it will give their engineers creative capabilities that as yet- have not been imagined.