As an early adopter personally, augmented/mixed/virtual reality (XR) has been on my radar since 2016 and it’s great to have a bird’s eye view at IndustryWeek of how the manufacturing industry leverages this technology.
In March, we wrote about Ford’s deployment of augmented reality (AR) for training purposes at its Rawsonville Components Plant near Detroit.
This month we attended Realize Live, also in Detroit, Siemens Digital Industries Software's annual conference and found HIVE, or Highly Immersive Virtual Environment, developed by Sibo Chou at Northrop Grumman, for which Chou won the 2025 Innovation Leader Award.
HIVE combines motion capture technology with Siemens Process Simulate software to create a simulation that tests whether or with how much difficulty operators can access different parts of an aircraft during assembly. The technology informs design for manufacturing (DFM) discipline, ergonomics studies, and creation of virtual reality (VR) simulations.
More to come soon on how Northrop Grumman uses Siemens software to support design for manufacturing and use simulations to decrease testing periods before moving on to physical product tests. In the interim, we hope you enjoy checking out HIVE.
