Burns & McDonnell
Sarah Darmitzel is an associate structural engineer and assistant project manager at Burns & McDonnell, where she’s been designing and building new and upgraded power generating facilities for fourteen years in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Continuing to perform our work and make progress on job sites now means understanding how to complete the same tasks even more safely, either with fewer people or from remote locations — or both. Fortunately, new technologies lend themselves to continued connectivity and allow us to strengthen our ability to perform the same work from an office or home.
Discovering Solutions
One such technology is augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), made possible by tools like the RealWear headset. This tool provides a camera, headphones, and microphone mounted to a hard hat and is designed to be worn by a worker on a job site.
When paired with a software such as VisualSpection, AR/VR technology offers a wide variety of uses, including recording videos and photos saved by GPS location; providing detailed information for inspections; and allowing more accurate information to be recorded, shared and understood more safely and efficiently.
The current world climate presents us with the opportunity to make significant use of another key feature AR/VR headsets can provide: the ability to livestream video of what the worker is seeing in real time while conferencing with distanced users.