Through the looking glass: General Industry Coverage

There’s an app for that, on that?! Google Glass, a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display built into a spectacle frame, is only available in the limited Explorer Edition for select testers and software developers, but an MTConnect app is already available. (MTConnect is an open, royalty-free standard intended to foster enhanced interoperability between software applications and manufacturing devices and equipment, thereby lowering the barriers to “manufacturing intelligence.”)

Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Cos. (ITAMCO) is a Google Glass beta tester and developed its MTConnect app for the device. The app is available free of charge and does not include advertising, according to Joel D. Neidig, technology manager for the gearing and machining services provider. “Apps are a secondary thing for our company,” he said, “but we will probably be open sourcing the code for that app so others can build upon it and make better apps. It’s about giving back to the industry.”

Courtesy of ITAMCO

The MTConnect app for Google Glass, shown here, enables a user to gather and share MTConnect-provided machine data. The display is in the upper right-hand corner.

According to ITAMCO, Google Glass, coupled with MTConnect functionality, provides a previously unattainable view into the manufacturing process, enabling users to travel the entire shop floor, gather and share MTConnect-provided machine tool data and access the Internet while being liberated from laptops and hand-held devices. The app enables MTConnect agents to directly stream data to Google Glass, which recognizes the machine tool, grabs appropriate information from MTConnect and parses the MTConnect stream to display it in a user-friendly manner.