Mixed-Reality Solution to Support Vessel Maintenance

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The Royal Canadian Navy is seeking new ways to leverage emerging technologies in order to enhance performance alongside and at sea. A new software may provide sailors with the opportunity to explore a new, and potentially much more efficient way of conducting onboard maintenance. It will allow them to make better-informed decisions more rapidly, with all the information and resources possible in a secure system.

As 3D interactive content is more easily interpreted than paper manuals, it reduces any mental fatigue that soldiers, sailors or air force personnel might be facing under stressful conditions.

The Canadian Navy will be using the Mixed Reality Remote Assistant Support (MIRRAS) system that leverages artificial intelligence and augmented reality, to improve ship maintenance and repairs on navy vessels.

The system developed by tech startup Kognitiv Spark can be used by marine technicians, as well as weapons engineering technicians, for ensuring that the ships maintain readiness for routine training and operational deployments.

MIRRAS is built to work with Microsoft’s HoloLens, an untethered mixed reality headset, that allows experts to see what the lens wearers see from anywhere in the world. The system will allow subject-matter experts to provide guidance and direction, using real-time voice and video, interactive holograms, and live IoT data.

The technician could, as an alternative, use locally-stored data to assist with routine tasks when remote experts are unavailable. The holographic support would be used to improve efficient decision-making for both technicians and experts, according to betakit.com.

Kognitiv Spark uses augmented and mixed reality to deliver holographic industrial worker support with interactive 3D content, artificial intelligence, and live IoT data.

The company’s RemoteSpark platform is a holographic worker support solution that uses the power of Mixed/Augmented Reality for workplace remote support.

This industrial augmented reality solution delivers live expert communications, organizational intelligence, and complex data in an intuitive format. The platform is reliable under low bandwidth conditions, IoT enabled, integrates with any organization’s existing systems and software, and can be deployed on a closed cloud network, according to the company website.

“Our solution delivers a toolset that can take advantage of the most powerful visual processing system on the planet, the human brain,” said Duncan McSporran, a former military officer and the company’s co-founder and COO.