We worked with Ben Gilbert from Agency of Sculpture to develop a holographic application that allowed fabricators to view the geometry of curved steel components while they were being formed with a section roller. The application worked by enabling the fabricator to move the holographic part through a virtual roller at the same time as the physical steel tube, and make adjustments to the radius and orientation of the rolled part until it matched the hologram as closely as possible. While skill with the machine correlated pretty well with the quality of fabricated parts, the application allowed even inexperienced fabricators (ourselves) to get close to matching the digital model with minimal training.
This approach to augmenting analog tools with interactive digital guides generalizes well to just about any other analog tool that is used spatially e.g. Benders, welders, drills, presses, saws etc, and is a very cheap way of fabricating complex parts if wide tolerances are acceptable.
Check out the video of the project here: https://vimeo.com/238883496