Interactive Hologram at HEC Dhahran Expo

The Problem

PWS needed to demo 30‑tonne excavators and crawler cranes without shipping kits to the site. Flat screens wouldn’t suffice; engineers expect to inspect moving hydraulics from all angles. Brief: build a life‑scale, glass‑free hologram that felt tactile, ran reliably under expo conditions, and surfaced spec data on gesture.

Our Build

Deployed a 2.1 m tall cylindrical holographic display, 360° viewable, no headset required. Unity URP pipeline drove real‑time rendering inside the cylinder’s light field:

Asset pipeline: SolidWorks CAD → <120 MB LOD‑optimised meshes via PiXYZ Plugin, retaining weld seams and hydraulic routing fidelity
Interaction layer: Ultraleap hand tracking fused to cylinder geometry (sub‑20 ms latency). Pinch‑rotate the boom, air‑tap to explode assemblies, palm‑hover for live telemetry (fuel burn, swing torque)
Edge compute: Four NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orins handled local rendering, zero cloud dependency, critical for Dhahran’s variable connectivity
UX validation: Three rounds of gesture A/B tests with PWS field engineers. Replaced swipe‑zoom with two‑handed scaling; dwell time increased 68%

On Site

Sensor fusion calibrated in 90 minutes despite 450‑lux ambient light. System logged 4,187 interactions across 72 hours:

– Avg. session: 4 m 42 s (vs. 52 s industry baseline)
– 83% completed full component drill‑down (hydraulics → cylinder specs → service intervals)
– Zero thermal throttling, GPU temps held at 68°C avg. under continuous load

Outcome

217 qualified leads captured (34% uplift YoY). Post‑event feedback: “Felt like walking around the real machine, could inspect boom bushing wear without a ladder.” (Senior Plant Manager, NEOM contractor)

Takeaway

Treat holography as a spatial data interface, not spectacle. We engineered for workflow first, then for latency, spec fidelity, and multi‑user interaction within the cylinder’s volume; presence followed. Unity’s lightweight runtime beat Unreal for edge deployment. Next iteration: integrate HoloLens 2 passthrough for on‑site service training.