A Hands-Free Solution, for Hands-ON Collaboration

What do you get when you mix leading-edge technology with a brewery? In this case, the First Annual RealWear Summit. This year, I had the opportunity to attend the summit with my colleague, Charlie Neagoy, and demonstrate the Onsight Connect collaboration software on RealWear’s HMT-1 wearable.

Described as a rugged head-mounted tablet, the HMT-1 is RealWear’s answer to a hands-free wearable designed exclusively for the industrial space. One difference between the HMT-1 and traditional smartglass products is that the HMT-1’s screen doesn’t obscure the users line of sight, and it flips back entirely out of the way for 100% unobstructed field of view. It’s also the only wearable display that is compatible with all regular safety glasses.  An interesting note is that the HMT-1’s design was partly inspired by Star Wars character Boba Fett and his helmet-mounted range finder. Combined with Onsight Connect, the HMT-1 becomes a powerful way for workers to collaborate hands-free with their remote experts just using voice commands.

The summit took place at the Devil’s Canyon Brewery, which made for an interesting venue and allowed all the demonstrations to operate in a real-world scenario. The problem happening at the brewery was a cavitating pump, which slows down processes and damages the QA of the beer. Our real-world demonstration showed a brewery worker sharing live video and pictures, talking and telestrating with an offsite expert over the brewery’s wireless network. The brewery worker used voice commands to access the HMT-1 and Onsight features, providing a truly hands-free solution.

This location choice added a unique experience factor for those who attended, which included some well-known names in the industrial space. The attendees all learned how to reprogram the pump. We also had an opportunity to show how Onsight and the HMT-1 perform on real-world networks, where it is typical to see sub 250 kbps. The demonstration included the ability to share live video at sub 97 kbps and take high-resolution pictures to see details.

Being at the summit, I had the pleasure of meeting RealWear’s talented management and developer teams firsthand, all of whom were very keen and professional. Working together, we presented Onsight and RealWear operating together flawlessly and highlighted the natural strengths of both platforms. All in all, it was a great experience and we received lots of positive feedback for the demonstration we provided.

Written By Christian Gan, Software Architect at Librestream Technologies