We collaborated with All Brick and the University of Tasmania to build a small feature using an interactive mixed reality model to show the precise location of each brick in the design. Removing the need to create templates, check drawings or take physical measurements to determine the location of bricks meant that constructing the wall from approximately 600 uniquely positioned bricks reduced build from from an estimated 2 weeks to only 6.5 hours of bricklaying. You can hear Colin talk about his experience building the project here:
Once a digital model has been produced showing each brick in the design, developing the holographic instructions is as simple as sorting bricks by height and showing one course at a time. This was further improved to show only an outline of the top face of each brick, enabling bricklayers to use this as a virtual boundary during placement.
This approach generalizes to all small scale bricklaying, as the precision of the HoloLens is well within the tolerances of general construction. We evaluated this by taking a lidar scan of the project and measuring the deviation between the scan and the digital model using during construction. You can read more about the results in a paper we published on the project: