ARUNA RAVICHANDRAN DRIVER

The Webex hologram renderings can be annotated with CAD (computer-aided design) drawings overlaid on the physical object. Traditional video calling and conferencing are falling behind Hologram because “you can’t collaborate in this 3D space,” says Green. So the main goal for us is to reduce the inefficiencies and reduce the time to help the McLaren team.” “And you can actually manipulate the object, you can look under the hood, you can look at the engine.

“You can collaborate with that object so that the same person can actually see what the person physically in the room can see,” said Aruna Ravichandran, CMO at Cisco Webex. However, he says that within hours, production managers were clamoring for it to be incorporated into their regular workflow, asking, “Why aren’t we in production?”

When McLaren first installed the hologram pod at its facility, Green says they deliberately chose a location that was out of the way so the novel technology wouldn’t interfere. Norris, Green recalls, immediately started thinking about how he could avoid physical presence at press conferences and see prototypes of his racing helmet throughout the design process.

ARUNA RAVICHANDRAN DRIVER

Green was so excited he ran to the briefing room next door to grab McLaren F1 driver Lando Norris so he could see for himself. “It’s really that moment where you can blur the physical and the digital and erase boundaries,” says Edward Green, director of commercial technology at McLaren, who admitted to unleashing “quite a lot of bad language” when he first saw the Webex Hologram tried it out “because it was really the most impressive piece of tech I had seen.”ĭuring that first try, a Cisco executive seated in a San Jose office aimed a basketball toward the hologram pod’s camera bank, causing Green to wince a continent and an ocean away. These glasses – like Microsoft’s HoloLens or Magic Leap’s AR glasses – replicate the object to examine it closely and annotate changes. McLaren Racing was an early test partner of Cisco’s Webex hologram, where an object placed in front of a camera array can be viewed digitally in 3D by meeting participants around the world wearing augmented reality headsets. Soon it could be a drive down the road to the second manufacturing facility, which is currently under construction.īut a new tool helps make those tedious trips unnecessary. The design and manufacturing departments are closely intertwined at every engineering outpost, and collaboration needs to be particularly precise in an industry like Formula 1, where every gram and millisecond can impact performance at a Grand Prix.Īt the McLaren Technology Center in Woking, England, this back-and-forth communication manifests itself in designers running up and down the stairs to the production floor.

Aruna ravichandran