Manufacturing companies face a range of practical challenges, from maintaining complex equipment to training personnel and managing inspections or quality control processes. These activities often require access to specific expertise, which may not always be available on site when needed.
Smart glasses and other augmented reality devices are increasingly being used to support technicians and operators in these situations. By allowing information, remote assistance and digital content to be accessed hands-free, they can support a variety of activities.
The following examples look at how these technologies are being used in real manufacturing environments, particularly in maintenance, training and quality control.
Where AR it’s Used in Manufacturing: Logistics, Maintenance, and Quality
Kiber’s AR smart glasses for manufacturing are built around three connected use cases:
- Warehouse and logistics: hands-free access to picking lists, inventory checks, and process guidance without putting down a scanner or a tool.
- Machine maintenance: technicians wearing the device streams what they see to a remote expert, who can guide a repair or diagnostic step in real time, right down to annotating the technician’s own view.
- Quality inspection: reviewing a production step or a finished part through the technician’s point of view, catching issues before a batch moves downstream
Case Study: Fosber — AR Smart Glasses for Remote Start-Up During a Lockdown
Fosber, a global supplier of production lines for corrugated board packaging, was mid-installation of a new corrugator at a customer’s plant in South Africa when travel restrictions made it impossible for its engineering team to reach the site. Mechanical work was nearly finished, but the electrics weren’t and the engineers who knew the system best were back in Italy, with a flight and days of downtime standing between the plant and a fix.
Instead of waiting for that trip, Fosber equipped the on-site workforce with Kiber’s smart helmet and gave its own engineers remote access through Kiber’s web portal. The two teams completed the installation together over live audio and video, with the remote engineers guiding local technicians step by step: no travel costs, no waiting for flight availability, no lost days for a team that was needed elsewhere.
Training sessions were recorded and added to Fosber’s internal knowledge base, so future maintenance teams could review them directly instead of needing a live expert every time.
The result: the line went live on schedule and the recorded sessions became a reusable training asset, not a one-off fix.
Where This Matters Most on
the Manufacturing Floor
Kiber’s manufacturing use cases aren’t limited to emergency situations. Tecnimont used Kiber 3 to carry out remote inspections at the LIWA Plastics EPC 2 project in Oman, successfully supporting the startup of a process unit without requiring specialists to travel to the site. A.Celli has used the same approach to bring faster, more consistent technical assistance to its own customers, without needing an in-person visit for every issue.
Quality Approvals, Without the Travel
A large share of manufacturing quality work still depends on someone being physically present: in-process inspections (QCP/ITP), Factory and Site Acceptance Tests (FAT/SAT), supplier audits, and pre-shipment sign-off. Coordinating customers, inspectors, and suppliers across multiple facilities and countries for each of these adds travel cost, scheduling friction, and delays approvals that are often on the critical path for shipping a product.
Kiber’s platform supports this process directly: live first-person video and AR annotation let inspectors and stakeholders join a session remotely, drawings and checklists are shared and documented live, and sessions are recorded for compliance and sign-off.
This model is already proven across packaging and paper, automotive, industrial machinery, and glass manufacturing.
Kiber for Manufacturing
Kiber’s Manufacturing solutions bring together warehouse support, machine maintenance, and remote quality inspection on one platform, running on devices like Kiberscope.
Request a demo
Fill out the form to request a demo with one of our specialists
