A HUD for the location network

System status straight into the field of view: one afternoon, one pair of smart glasses, one prototype. And the open question of what it is actually for.

Pair of smart glasses on a workbench in the lab

One afternoon, one pair of glasses

That is all it was: a pair of smart glasses, one afternoon in the workshop, and at the end a prototype that brings system status straight into the field of view. What normally sits in a dashboard now sits at the edge of your vision while you do something else. No project, no plan, no budget. An experiment, written down because we learned something along the way.

Why at all

Anyone running a location network wants to see status without opening a dashboard. A dashboard demands an occasion: you sit down, open it, search. The field of view is simply there. While walking, between two conversations, with your hands on something else. That was the entire motivation. Whether it holds up is a different question, which is exactly why it stands here as a question.

What we learned

In the field of view, less is more. Our first reflex was to bring the charts along: curves, trends, columns of numbers. The reflex was wrong. All of it gets in the way more than it helps in this place. What works is a handful of states, ok or warning, nothing more. Anyone who wants to know more can still open the dashboard afterwards. That is the one insight the afternoon was worth.

Honest status

So far this is a toy. We write it this plainly because we mean it exactly this way: the prototype sits in the lab and waits for its use case. There are candidates. The operations walk-through, where you go from location to location and pick up system status along the way. On-site visits, where a glance at the network helps without a laptop opening up. But the question “what is it good for” is open, and we will not answer it with a claim. If a case turns up that gets the prototype out of the lab, we will write again.

Read on: The HUD in the playground · All workshop notes