BMW’s new smart glasses can put technical drawings right in front of a tech’s eyes
They can also phone home to Germany for trickier diagnoses.
It's been a long time since Google Glass arrived and promptly departed from the world, but automakers think they have a much smarter solution for smart glasses, and BMW is the latest to show off this tech.
BMW announced on Tuesday that it has developed a new set of smart glasses for its dealership technicians. The TSARAVision Smart Glasses, named after BMW's new online case-reporting system TSARA, can be used to speed up diagnostic and repair procedures by offering up everything a tech needs without having to thumb through physical manuals or pick up a phone.
The glasses, which don't really resemble glasses in the traditional sense, have the ability to put step-by-step instructions or technical drawings right in front of a technician's eyes. The glasses can also take screenshots, and they're capable of zooming in on photos to get a little extra detail when necessary.
In the event a problem proves too tricky, a tech can also uses the smart glasses to phone home to Germany, where engineers can get a live look at the problem to better work through it. If the tech needs to open up a new document, he or she can do so with just their voice, keeping hands free for the actual nitty-gritty work.
BMW says this new tech should be at all BMW dealers by June. It's not the first company to try something like this, though. We got to experience Porsche's Tech Live Look smart glasses last year, which look equally silly but are built with the same goal in mind -- speeding up the repair process from every angle possible.
