BMW is using Quest 3 mixed reality to train technicians to repair its electric car batteries.
Electric vehicle batteries are an intricate assembly of cells, wiring, and fasteners. Repairing them is challenging, and physically training technicians to repair them would require expensive and easily damaged replicas.
Exploring solutions to this problem, BMW of North America built a Quest 3 mixed reality app it calls Impossible Battery.
Impossible Battery features an interactive virtual replica of BMW’s fifth-generation EV battery, and lets technicians spawn the 14 different tools needed to work on it.
BMW’s Impossible Battery Quest 3 mixed reality app.
Rather than trying to imperfectly replicate the specific interactions of using these tools, the app simply has the technician use hand tracking to tap the position where the tool should be used. The intention here is to give the technician a full understanding of the battery system, not frustrate them with clunky interactions.
BMW and Meta say Impossible Battery is an ideal training tool for new starts and seasoned technicians needing to get up to speed on EV batteries alike.
“Building digital twins and integrating them into our workflows is likely to be the number one use of industrial VR going forward,” BMW’s Corporate Strategy Manager for Innovations told Meta. “Programs that would have been too dangerous, ineffective, or just cost-prohibitive in the past can be developed, rolled out, and scaled for a fraction of the cost using VR.”
Impossible Battery also includes “gamification mechanics”, including tracking the time and cost of repairs, and BMW says it plans to add global leaderboards so that training centers can compete on who can make a valid repair the fastest.
The company is also experimenting with using Impossible Battery as a visualization tool, showing an X-ray view of how the electricity and coolants are flowing.
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