50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

You can't afford to be slapped-dash when you're making a spacecraft.

At Lockheed Martin, it used to take a technician to painstaking days to measure 309 locations

for certain fasteners on a particular curved panel.

But according to Shelley Peterson, the aerospace company's head of emerging technologies,

the same job now takes little more than two hours.

What changed?

The technician started wearing glasses.

Not just any old glasses, specifically the Microsoft HoloLens.

It looks like a bulky set of safety goggles, and it layers digital information over the

real world.

In this case, it scans the curved panel, makes its calculations, and shows the technician

exactly where each fasteners should go.

Productivity experts are gushing about augmented reality devices such as the HoloLens and

Google Glass.

Many jobs, after all, involve frequent pauses to consult a screen that tells us what to do

next.

With smart specs, we can see those instructions while we keep working.

It saves a vital few seconds in getting information from internet to brain.

A thousand years ago, information travelled rather more slowly.

In Cairo, in the 1010s, the Bazzroborn Polymath Hassan Ibn Al-Hatham wrote his masterwork,

the book of optics.

...