Reactor — Mixed Reality Platform for Aviation Maintenance
A Mixed Reality platform for Microsoft HoloLens that brings technical knowledge right in front of a technician's eyes at the right time, replacing thousand-page PDF manuals with contextual 3D holograms.
Change the working environment of MRO engineers by overlaying digital knowledge onto physical aircraft engines — enabling junior technicians to perform complex tasks and senior experts to supervise remotely.
- Mixed Reality
- HoloLens
- Aviation
- AR
- UX
About
No matter how senior the technician is, repairing an aircraft engine requires continuous access to multiple manuals, instructions, and job cards. The current industry standard is thousand-page PDF books filled with 2D drawings — hard to read, slow to navigate, and disconnected from the physical work.
We built Reactor — a Mixed Reality platform for Microsoft HoloLens that overlays digital knowledge onto the physical world, enabling the user to steer the virtual by interacting with the real.
Over nine months of working hand-in-hand with engineers and practitioners from MRO facilities, we developed and iterated a range of prototypes now being tested in real MRO and component manufacturing environments.
Core Features
Contextual manuals and documentation — technical knowledge delivered directly in front of the engineer’s eyes, at the moment it’s needed.
Remote supervision — a senior expert can watch a junior engineer’s view in real time and correct mistakes on the spot without being physically present.
3D holograms — virtual overlays extend an engineer’s vision to internal processes and structural design inside a physical engine.
Animated process tutorials — step-by-step disassembly procedures rendered as 3D animations, making sophisticated tasks accessible to junior technicians.
Work in Progress
Scaling content — adding new engine parts and components, expanding the interface to support component callouts with descriptions, images, and video tutorials attached directly to selected engine parts.
Photo catalog — any engine part can have its own image gallery with full management: delete, add, or take a photo on the spot. Aimed at inspections and quality assurance workflows.
Work order instructions — an instruction layout for manufacturing tasks that handles text, photos, tables, and quality checks. Layers expand to the right and collapse once processed.
Click without focus — a special interaction mode for advancing through instruction lists during inspections, providing maximum convenience when both hands are occupied.
Real-object recognition — once a physical object is recognised, any of its parts becomes an active UI element. The user can zoom in or change its state depending on context.