Boeing's wireshop employees are the factory-floor guinea pigs. Managers selected AR participants from volunteers, mixing in both greenhorns and veterans. The bundles can contain hundreds of wires, each of which might bring light to seat 27E or control signals to the cockpit. Workers typically place the longer bundles onto customized formboards that approximate how wires will be strung throughout the plane. Assemblers must bounce from computer printouts to the formboards to see which bundles get linked to which connectors.
Builders sometimes work with only a single wire at a time, using schematics glued to the boards.
Mistakes can be costly - improperly strung bundles must be rebuilt. The AR setup offers a guiding electronic hand that frees assemblers from repeatedly checking paper diagrams and parts lists. A video camera on the headset transmits images of the dots to a database that can determine, based on the number and size of the dots viewed, exactly where the worker is in relation to the board. The AR software also reads the pitch and yaw of the worker's head. With the monocle in place, employees see not only their workspace, but also an overlaid monochrome assembly diagram that has been imported wirelessly from a graphical database.