Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is an architect and excited about the use of holograms in elevator maintenance:
Source: Microsoft
Essentially, you look through the goggles and see the object, can walk around it, zoom in and out, rotate and if it was built to do so, explode it into its components. As an architect, I can say right now that this is going to revolutionize the design, construction and maintenance of buildings, perhaps as dramatically as CAD and BIM have.
I believe this because elevators are a big, complex and expensive part of buildings, and thyssenkrupp Elevator is revolutionizing the way they work on them right now. However the technologies that they are demonstrating have broad implications for everyone in the building and many other businesses.
Elevators carry a billion people a day around the world, and are complex mixes of thousands of mechanical and electronic components. When they break down it’s a big deal, whether you are waiting for it or stuck in it. Lives depend on it. Maintenance is critical, both scheduled and emergency; thyssenkrupp alone has 24,000 technicians running around in trucks doing service. Given the different brands of elevators and the 150 years they have been in buildings, there must be millions of different configurations and parts. No wonder it always seems that it takes forever to fix them.
24,000 technicians. Sometimes you don’t think about the infrastructure requirements of just one company.
