Porsche's Tech Live Look glasses bring AR to the dealership

They significantly cut down service times by letting Porsche's remote expert technicians see what the on-location mechanic is seeing.

While virtual reality continues to sadly flounder, loved by few but ignored by most, augmented reality at least is taking off. With support for the technology, which can draw virtual images over the real world, available in all modern smartphones, it's easy to start dropping digital furniture in your living room or virtual Stormtroopers in your selfies.

Porsche was an early adopter of the tech, releasing an app that lets you drive a little Mission E around your living room and even sit inside the virtual cockpit. Now, the company is bringing a somewhat more hardened experience to its dealerships through a system it calls Tech Live Look.


Tech Live Look is a pair of glasses that, upon first glance, gave me flashbacks to my time spent wearing that most famous of AR headsets, Google Glass. However, the implementation here is quite different.

Porsche's glasses, created by ODG, rely on a pair of transparent displays that sit directly before your eyes. This contrasts with the single, small display on Glass that sat just at the edge of your field of view.

Where Glass primarily served as a notification device, Tech Live Look has a far more utilitarian task: giving Porsche service technicians hands-free access to all the data in the cloud. No, it isn't quite Major Kusanagi jacking into the 'net in Ghost in the Shell, but it's the same basic idea.

For starters, this enables technicians to search for and consult technical documentation hands-free, something that would have been a boon for me when I was soldering together a harness for my Subaru's new head unit last year.

Documents appear floating in space and, while you need to search for them using a tiny trackpad, voice recognition and gesture commands are coming in a future update.

The bigger piece, however, is the ability for the glasses to directly call a remote Porsche service expert. Once connected, that remote technician can see exactly what the on-location mechanic is seeing, interactively troubleshooting complex issues that previously required lengthy back-and-forth exchanges of murky smartphone pictures.

The remote technician can tell the on-location technician what to do, even drawing on the video feed to show where to look.

I had a chance to try this service at Porsche North America HQ in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was able to troubleshoot an obscure error code thrown by a new Panamera Sport Turismo. I connected wirelessly to a Porsche expert, who then walked me through the troubleshooting process.

The code indicated a fault from a given sensor, and the first step was to verify the status of the connectors on the sensor's plug.