Sector · Decision support
Text in front of the eye while the hands work
The oldest and best documented use of smart glasses: put the next instruction where the person is already looking, so they never put the work down to go read it.
This is the use case with real numbers behind it, published by the companies that ran it, and it is also the least glamorous. No hologram. A step, a torque figure, a part number, shown in the corner of the eye while both hands stay on the job.
Boeing replaced wiring diagrams up to six metres long with instructions on the lens for the harness assembly line, where roughly 130 miles of cable go into one aircraft: the technician scans a code on the component box and the step for that batch appears, advanced by voice. Assembly time fell 25 percent, a figure repeated in three separate reports across five years. The error claim is the one to watch, because the sources disagree: the 2016 report says the error rate was cut in half, the 2017 and 2021 reports say near zero. We publish both.
GE Aviation paired the same idea with a Wi-Fi torque wrench, so the torque applied to each bolt was logged automatically, and reported 8 to 12 percent more mechanic efficiency, with some tasks falling from 51 to 38 minutes.
The second shape is the expert who does not fly
Most of the rest of this list is remote assistance: the person on site wears the glasses, the specialist sees what they see and talks them through it. BMW put it in 347 dealer centres and reported repairs up to 75 percent faster. Volkswagen Group UK ran a pilot and reported repair efficiency up 93 percent, worth about GBP 250,000 in vehicle downtime. TotalEnergies uses an intrinsically safe model in hazardous areas so a field worker can pull up schematics without hands and call a specialist instead of a flight. In China, State Grid crews read meters by OCR and take transformer temperatures with a clip-on thermal camera while the backend feeds them the inspection route.
Where decision support turns into identification
Two entries here are not about maintenance. WIRED found an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag inside the Meta AI app, built to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures; after public pressure Meta stripped the code out in June 2026. In India, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a petition against police use of biometric surveillance at protests, smart glasses included. Deciding faster and identifying people are different products, and the second one is where the law is moving.