

“But today, in manufacturing and engineering. “As technology advances and form factors change, surely On the track it will be really interesting,” says Green. There may be a chance that this technology will eventually make it to the garage on race day. Green says traditional video calls and conferences don’t quite live up to a hologram because “you can’t collaborate in this 3D space.” Webex Hologram displays can be annotated with CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings on top of the physical object. And so the main objective for us is, to reduce inefficiencies and reduce time in order to help McLaren.” “And you can actually manipulate the body, you can look under the hood, you can look at the engine.

“You can work with this object together so that the same person can see what the person in the room can physically see,” says Aruna Ravichandran, chief marketing officer of Cisco Webex. However, within two hours, he said, production managers were demanding that it be incorporated into their normal workflow, asking, “Why aren’t we on the store floor?” When McLaren first installed the hologram capsule at its facility, Green says they deliberately chose a location that was out of the way so the new technology wouldn’t be too disruptive. Norris, Green, remembers that he immediately began thinking of ways to avoid physical attendance at press conferences and see prototypes of his racing helmet throughout the design process.
#ARUNA RAVICHANDRAN DRIVER#
Green was so in love that he ran into the adjacent boardroom to take McLaren Formula 1 driver Lando Norris to see him for himself. Through those glasses – such as Microsoft’s HoloLens or augmented reality glasses made by Magic Leap – the object is replicated for close examination and annotation modifications.ĭuring that first experience, a Cisco executive sitting in an office in San Jose passed a basketball toward the camera bank in the hologram booth, making Green flounder on a distant continent and ocean. McLaren Racing was an early test partner of Cisco’s Webex Hologram, in which an object placed in front of the camera array can be digitally viewed in 3D by meeting attendees wearing augmented reality headsets around the world. And soon, it could include a car trip to the second manufacturing facility currently under construction.īut there is a new tool that helps make these arduous journeys unnecessary. The design and manufacturing divisions are inherently intertwined in all of the engineering outposts, and collaboration has to be particularly delicate in an industry like Formula 1 where every gram and millisecond can affect performance in a grand prix.Īt the McLaren Technology Center in Woking, England, that back-and-forth connection manifests in designers running up and down the stairs to the production floor.
