Augmented Reality Smart Meter for Northumbrian Water

Client

Northumbrian Water Group

Deliverables

Intuitive AR water meter demonstrator
True-to-scale digital twin water meter

Delivering an AR smart meter nationwide

As part of celebrating their Innovation Festival, Northumbrian Water Group asked MAADIGITAL to help demonstrate their new smart water meter to engineers and the public.

The major problem they faced was that the Innovation Festival was not going to be help in a single location, and face-to-face interaction and demonstrations were severely limited. NWG needed a way to get the device in front of customers and engineers without the exorbitant cost of shipping units across the country.

MAADIGITAL stepped in to create a smart and innovative display piece in augmented reality, meaning it could appear at true scale, anywhere, as well as performing tricks that a real-world object could never manage.

We worked with CAD drawings and precise specifications to recreate a 1:1 3D model for display in augmented reality.

A multi-functional AR app

To demonstrate the smart meter at its best, the app needed to incorporate a number of features beyond just augmenting the meter onto nearby surfaces.

The smart meter is complex machine with dozens of finely-tuned parts making up the whole. The first AR scene ‘explodes’ the device to a component view.
The meter lives inside a specific in-ground housing, protecting it from harm and allowing it to broadcast a radio signal to make data collection a breeze. The second scene shows how it fits into the housing and collects and broadcasts data.
Key to the app is the ability to see specifications and determine whether the meter’s internal components can be swapped out for different uses. The third scene lets users explore the cavities and find detailed dimensional specifications, as well as directly comparing components with the scale of the device.