The Argument for Smart Glasses in Maintenance

In some fields, the goal is to be as invisible as possible. From software UI to electric car motors, numerous products are designed to run as smoothly and quietly in the background they can. If these products ever do make you think about them, it’s usually because something has gone wrong.

You might be surprised to learn that smart glasses, a product entirely dedicated to putting information directly in your sightline, are one of these fields. And yet, manufacturers like Vuzix spend a significant amount of effort and R&D making their products as unobtrusive as possible. Making them lighter, more comfortable and natural to wear, improving the battery so you don’t have to change packs as often, expanding offline capabilities so your experience isn’t suddenly interrupted if you step out of wifi range; the list goes on and on, but the goal is to make you forget you’re even wearing them.

“We want to get out of the way of the work,” Robby Moss, vice president of logistics solutions at Vuzix, said. “We’ve really worked hard to make the user experience almost fade away…In some cases, I really don’t want you looking at the glasses. I just want you focusing on the work. You want to be hands free and eyes up.”

When I sat down to talk to Moss, I was surprised by how much of the conversation was focused on this specific priority, but once you understand the market they’re working in, it makes sense why smart glasses manufacturers would be so concerned with it. That invisibility is what they’re selling.

The Pitch

Fundamentally, products like Vuzix’s glasses allow you to do three things: track ongoing work, validate the completion of that work and connect with experts and supporting documentation while you are working.

All of these tasks are incredibly valuable for a maintenance professional, especially one that has to drive out an hour to perform maintenance in the field. But they can also be accomplished with other tools that you probably already own and don’t start at $800 a pop. Vuzix’s M400, the glasses they’d recommend to maintenance professionals, run double that. You don’t have to go far on the internet to find a skeptic asking why they can’t just do all of those same things with the smart phone already in their pocket. In order to justify that price tag, smart glasses need to go above and beyond simple feature lists.

And so, when considering whether to buy these products, what you should be looking at is how convenient they are. Anybody can pick up a phone and call a tech back at the office, but nobody has a third hand to constantly wrangle the camera while they work. Put on a pair of smart glasses, and your head’s the camera and your hands are free. Your tech support, meanwhile, is able to follow what you’re looking at and give more accurate guidance.

That lines up with Moss’s pitch: keeping out of the way of the work. In this case, physically.

You can see this emphasis in almost every feature Moss showed me. Case in point, Vuzix’s new training mode, which is currently being rolled out. An obvious use case for smart glasses is for training purposes. Whether through a guided video call with an expert, documentation, or even having the glasses themselves guide them, maintenance techs can learn specifics about individual machines or tasks while on the job.

Of course, stay on the job long enough, and you’re going to memorize that process. Training wheels that start out helpful can become tedious as you learn to move faster than the glasses can. So when you’re ready, you can take the training wheels off. Like muting Google Maps, the goal is to keep the rest of the glasses’ functionality without forcing an experienced tech to endure a constant voice in their ear telling them things they already know.

A Basic Maintenance Example

Most smart glasses features will be equally useful across multiple fields and contexts, but it bears looking at a maintenance-specific example of how the tool looks in action.

“Let’s say I gotta go out and do some maintenance on a boiler, and I’ve got a certain workflow to go through,” Moss said. “We can get that done. We can put that on a route for you throughout the campus, hit all these different locations, I’m going to scan a barcode to make sure that I’m in the right location and validate that I went to that location. And based on that location data, and the beginning of the workflow, and the task order, I’m going to have certain steps to complete. I’m going to have tools and parts that I have to use for that maintenance. All of that can be done either online or offline.”

In just this one example, there are several different tasks the glasses are executing to make this a smooth process. First, the basic framework, with the ability to set and track a full maintenance itinerary at the start. Then, the ability to track, step by step, what that process should look like, while you’re going through it.

Then there’s the fact that losing wifi connection or switching between hot spots as you move from building to building won’t scupper that entire workflow. The glasses don’t lose their place or start over just because the internet flickered. They can continue to track what you’re working on and give you your next task even if you’re offline.

Finally, documentation. Instead of stopping to fill out a paper detailing all the work done, the glasses can record that you were there and log the task you completed. For some companies, this is just a nice to have, but for others, proof of delivery is essential.

Each of these steps is a potential break point where your workflow can be disrupted, and smart glasses manufacturers are going to great lengths to be the solution that prevents those disruptions from happening. Even their software design is meant to be as seamless as possible. According to Moss, Vuzix can spin up a demo in a matter of days. They have their own software suite, Mobilium, that gives them flexible control over their product and allows them to make custom integrations with modern tools like MaintainX. Their backend work isn’t quite a fully customized solution, but it’s close.

What About AI?

Inevitably, any high-tech gizmo these days gets tied to AI, and AR glasses aren’t any different. Just look around Vuzix’s website and you’ll find plenty of marketing copy about combining the power of AI and augmented reality (AR).

It’s hard not to imagine a sci-fi future where a knowledgeable AI connected to your glasses can guide you through exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, step by step, while even adjusting on the fly to current conditions. Such a possibility is, arguably, the final form smart glasses have been chasing from the start. It is, however, still just the future for now.

“It’s not here yet," Moss said. "But I do think it’s coming.”

In the current moment, when companies are slapping AI on any product they can whether it works or not, that’s an appreciably pragmatic and levelheaded answer. Moss is clearly dedicated to processing the technology properly, not quickly. Vuzix has started incorporating LLMs in small ways, particularly when working with barcodes, but by and large, the tech is still developing so rapidly that the future is difficult to predict.

“Personally, I don’t think you can think beyond a year, especially when you think about AI,” Moss said. “The frontier models are doing things now that they couldn’t do a few months ago.”

Seeing the Value in Smart Glasses

Rewind a decade to when Google Glass first hit the market. They arrived with great fanfare and big promises. But equally big price tags, privacy concerns and a lack of practical use cases all doomed the product within just a year. Ultimately, despite multiple stabs at the concept since, Google Glass has never become much more than a novelty.

That’s a difficult label for any technology to overcome, and smart glasses have had a long decade overcoming its associated skepticism. Today, however, they are coming into their own. The price tags are still eyebrow-raising, but today’s glasses manufacturers aren’t struggling to find proper use cases for them and the technology is continuing to mature day by day. Even just looking at Vuzix, their products have improved in leaps and bounds across multiple measurable metrics from video resolution to battery life. It’s clear that there are still a lot of ways the technology can continue to grow.

Ultimately, whether any product is right for you is going to require a personal answer based on your own circumstances — and a lengthy chat with that product’s salespeople to make sure you know exactly how it works. But the technology has something that it didn’t for a long time: a real, concrete value proposition.

If you haven’t thought about smart glasses in a few years, they’re worth giving another look. They may well surprise you.
 

www.vuzix.com