Question regarding outdoor-use scenario for forestry-training

Copper Contributor
Without access to a HL-device I am looking for an assessment/opinions regarding the following usage-szenario: For a remote training of farmers in a tropical environment we are looking into using HL2 + Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, where the expert (in a remote location) gives guidance to the course participants wearing the HL and working outdoors on the trees (pruning of trees etc.). I know that HL2 is designed with indoor use in mind. Still I'm interested in owners or maybe MS employees on the feasability of the described scenario and the possibility to overcome some of the challenges (providing shade for better visibility and cooler environment, setting up markers for better spatial recognition etc.) Thank you!
7 Replies

@daveold I'm not a tech person but I do know of use cases outdoors. For example construction workers, field engineers, maritime sector etc. and I work with Remote Assist a lot.

 

So my questions; what does the user have to do and what is expected from the specialist?

Will they want to use live annotations, share manuals etc. or is it just setting up a call so the specialist can explain the user what they need to do?

 

If they only have to setup a call so they can have a remote specialist to help them and talk them through things they have to do, being outdoors isn't that big of an issue.

If they want to use live annotations and share manuals, then you're dealing with the holograms which will suffer if there's a lot of direct sunlight.

 

Feel free to connect with me and I'm happy to offer more insights!

@AlexandraPetty thank you!

This mostly confirms what I expected. Unfortunately our idea was to make use of live annotations. This could probably be solved by providing some form of shade.

 

But then the regulatory information mention a max operational temperature of +27ºC, which could be reached in our environment. I suppose this means that the device switches off in hotter environments (and even faster when exposed to direct sunlight).

@daveold have you considered the Trimble XR10 HoloLens deviceTrimble Mixed Reality

 

That one is more geared towards outdoor use / environments with safety control requirements, although it does still use a HoloLens as the core device so to your point, the optimal temperature is still largely limited to +10 deg C to +27 deg C for now. 

 

Will certainly pass your feedback along to the HL team for consideration :)

@ShonaBang thank you, I haven't heard of the Trimble XR10 before. It certainly brings some useful additions but like you said the temperature limitations are still there and might not justify the risk of acquiring a HL without prior testing. A bit of a shame as I think the technology has great potential in outdoor use. Well, maybe the next generation ;)

@daveold If they want to use live annotations, that can be tricky. I would definitely recommend testing. The HoloLens makes use of light to project the holograms onto your eyes. From experience and talking to developers, this meant that if in bright sunlight they used full on magenta to make the holograms visible. In case of RA there's only a few preset colours to use.

 

I haven't had any experiences yet where temperature caused the device to switch off. It depends on how warm the CPU would get outside and with use. You could possible lookup the specs of the ARM processor and estimate when that would be.

 

I would definitely recommend testing this extensively. Perhaps there's some indoor scenarios that you can try out first?

@daveold hope you get this ping! I had to wait to be able to share this haha. One of the top MR devs I know had webinar on an application that was used in a high heat and high humidity environment. Thought this might be interesting for your use case.

 

https://youtu.be/f5zO53APj5M?t=779

@AlexandraPetty Thank you for these solution-oriented hints. Especially the webinar gives me some confidence.

We haven't actually planned to use any 3D-Models but some live-annotations for highlighting certain areas on the trees and plants. Certainly excessive testing would be necessary (like mentioned in the webinar) also to see how well the live-annotations deal with trees/foliage.