Company background:
Hood Engineering is a family run business based in Newtownstewart, Co Tyrone with over 30 years engineering experience. They manufacture a wide range of feed equipment and farm implements alongside tractor and machinery parts for instore and online including hydraulic fittings, bearings, belts, PTO shafts, oil and lubricants.
Challenge:
Hood Engineering wanted to create a range of Augmented Reality-based User Manuals for their new hitching components to help explain to clients how to attach the components.
Solution:
In order to overcome this obstacle, Hood Engineering made contact with North West Regional College (NWRC) Business Support Centre (BSC) who supported them through the InnovateUs programme which is funded by the Department for the Economy.
This provided 30 hours of 1:1 mentoring support from NWRC Creative and Digital Media Technical Consultant, Aaron McKeever, who supported both Antony and Maria Hood in Interactive brochure design, AR content creation and image tracking.
Impact:
On completion of the project, Hood Engineering successfully created a range of Augmented Reality-based User Manuals for their new hitching components.
Hood Engineering described the benefits of working with NWRC BSC via the InnovateUs programme:
”We approached NWRC for assistance in producing a video and an Operator and Parts Manual for our q hitch – one of the machines that we manufacture. We met with Aaron and explained what we required. He gave us the idea of integrating augmented reality into the manual and came out to our premises to shoot the video and integrated the video into the operator manual.
”When a customer looks at our operator manual, as well as reading how to attach the q hitch to their tractor, by using an app on their mobile phone and holding it over the pages of the manual, they can see the demonstration video of how to attach and detach the q hitch. Aaron also produced a QR code that we can put on to the q hitch, which can be scanned to view the video on a mobile device.
”Using augmented reality was something we had not even thought about and we are delighted at how it has turned out. We believe it will be an added bonus for our customers and it is something different – as far as we are aware it is not being used by many other machinery manufacturers at the minute.
”Aaron was great to work with and explained the process of how AR worked in the manual. He gave us guidance of how to adapt the manual using pdf software so that we can produce operator manuals for the rest of our range of q hitches. The support from the college has been great and we would encourage other businesses to avail of their assistance.”
