Aircraft Paint Thickness Scanner HUD for HoloLens
This HoloLens app interfaces with a TeraMetrix T-Ray scanner to record and display paint thickness on military aircraft.
- Coded various features of the system, including saving and loading from a remote server
- Designed and built the UI
- Created a separate tablet app to view saved data on a 3D virtualization of the plane
Details
Challenge
C-130s and other military aircraft are manually painted by people with paint sprayers, so there is potential for the paint being too thin in some places, and too thick in others. If the paint is too thick, it impacts the fuel economy of the plane, significantly increasing operating costs.
During the original process, after the plane was painted, an inspector would scan the paint thickness in various locations, look at and interpret the reading, then mark the locations where the paint isn’t the correct thickness with physical labels, then another crew would sand the paint off to be repainted.
This process was time consuming and imprecise, and they were looking for a more efficient process.
Solution
With the system I worked on, the inspector wears the HoloLens while scanning. When the trigger on the scanning device is pulled, it wirelessly sends the data to the HoloLens, where it interprets the results of the scan to create a virtual marker at that location in 3D space.
This marker object stores all of the information from that scan, and is color coded to indicate how close to within acceptable tolerance levels the paint thickness is. The markers persist as the rest of the plane was scanned, and can be later reselected to see the data in detail.
When a scan is complete it is saved to a local server to be later loaded onto any other HoloLens or viewed on the companion tablet app.
Tablet App
I created a companion tablet app for the system that allowed users to sync with the server and view the saved scans without needing the HoloLens. It included support for various types of planes.
Markers would be loaded onto a scale model of the plane, and could be tapped to see detailed information about the markers.
UI Animation Framework
I also created a reusable drag and drop UI animation framework to quickly add visual interest/feedback to the system’s UI.
With one top-layer component, all individual UI elements are automatically animated as the user switches between screens.
