engineer with BRT. "Now we're in a era where hardware is no longer the constraint."
Smartglasses get off the ground at Boeing
When Google released the first "Explorer Edition" of Glass in the fall of 2013, DeStories says his manager purchased a few of the early smartglasses and asked him to start tinkering, to see if Glass might be the hardware the company needed.
In early 2014, DeStories and his team got to work on a demo application designed specifically for wireless harness assembly. The challenge, according to DeStories: "How do we get that information to the technician right at the time they're doing it, in the shortest manner possible, with the simplest user input?" The goal was to "reduce [technician's] time from intent to action," he says.
It didn't take long to come up with a barebones Glass app, and DeStories and his crew started to slowly show it to small groups of wire harness techs. The Glass app was a hit and served as a proof of concept.
Later that year, an internal Boeing newsletter detailed the initiative, called "Project Juggernaut," and drew attention across the company. "It piqued a whole lot of interest," DeStories says. "That really forced us to take a step back and realize we needed an enterprise solution, not just this one-off application."
Juggernaut meets Skylight
To take Project Juggernaut to the next level, Boeing had to find a secure, reliable way to connect Glass to its wire harness database and pull the necessary information in real time.
"Boeing put a competitive RFP [request for proposal] out into the market that I'm sure all of the Glass at Work partners heard about," says Brian Ballard, CEO and cofounder of APX Labs, maker of the Skylight enterprise platform for smartglasses and a 2016 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer company. "They described a pain point in their manufacturing process, and we saw it and were like, 'Oh man, that is exactly what we can do.' We started a competitive bid for it and won the work."
Boeing and APX Labs started work to integrate Skylight in early 2015, according to Ballard, and between March and November, DeStories and his team traveled to various Boeing locations and showed an early offline version of the Glass app to determine whether or not the concept would stand up to scrutiny on the harness floor. The team also did an internal training event with about 20 people, expecting some pushback. "Out of those 20 people, maybe two were not that excited," he says. "The rest were excited to use it and picked up on it pretty quick."
It was clear, that "across the board, it was going to work," according to DeStories.
Putting Glass to work on Boeing wire harnesses
During the pilot, when a participant showed up for work she'd first visit a lockbox to check out a Glass unit, and then go to her computer to login and authenticate the device on the network, according to DeStories. For authentication, the tech would put on the smartglasses and scan a QR code generated by the system on her computer, which then pushed the wire harness app to the smartglasses. Next, the tech would head to her work station on the assembly floor, grab the next "shop order," and then scan another QR code on the box of components, which provided necessary status updates or notes and told her where to get started, DeStories says.
The Skylight app supports touch gestures and voice commands, so a tech could, for example, pick up a box of components, and then begin the process by saying, "OK Skylight. Start wire bundle. Scan order." Next, she might say, "OK Skylight. Local search. 0447," to quickly launch an assembly roadmap for the wire No. 0447 on her smartglasses heads-up display.
If she came across a problem she couldn't solve on her own, she could stream her point-of-view video of the wire harness to an expert in another location for assistance. Or she could check to see if there was another assembly video already available for playback on the smartglass display.
"When you truly sit in the pilot seat, from the technicians point of view, having a hands-free device where the information is just al