Boeing

Boeing
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Aerospace, Defense
Founded	July 15, 1916
Founder	William E. Boeing
Headquarters	Arlington, Virginia, United States
Notable Personnel	Thomas P. Caudell, David W. Mizell (early AR researchers)
Products	Commercial airliners, military aircraft, spacecraft (CST-100 Starliner)
Website	https://www.boeing.com

Boeing is an American aerospace manufacturer that designs and builds commercial airliners, military aircraft, satellites, and spacecraft. It was founded on July 15, 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington, and as of 2026 is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, having moved its corporate offices from Chicago in 2022.

In the history of augmented reality, Boeing has an outsized place: two of its researchers, Thomas P. Caudell and David W. Mizell, coined the term "augmented reality" around 1990 while developing a head-worn display to guide workers assembling aircraft wiring harnesses. The same wiring-assembly problem later became one of the most cited industrial AR case studies, and Boeing has since used virtual reality and AR for manufacturing, maintenance, and astronaut training.

Origin of the term "augmented reality"

In 1990, Thomas Caudell, a scientist in Boeing Computer Services Research and Technology, was looking for a way to help technicians assemble the long, complex bundles of wires used in aircraft. The conventional method relied on large physical formboards and paper diagrams that had to be reconfigured for each wiring layout. Caudell and his colleague David Mizell proposed a see-through head-mounted display that would superimpose the correct wire routing directly onto a generic board, so the same board could be reused for many configurations.

Caudell coined the term "augmented reality" to describe this overlay of computer-generated information onto a worker's view of the real world, distinguishing it from fully immersive virtual reality. He and Mizell described the concept and a prototype optical see-through display, which they called the "HUDset," in a 1992 paper presented at the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, titled "Augmented reality: An application of heads-up display technology to manual manufacturing processes." The paper is widely credited as the first published use of the term and as an early definition of AR as a technology for assisting manual manufacturing tasks.

Wiring harness assembly

Aircraft contain extensive electrical wiring; a single large jet uses well over 100 miles of wire, with each model and configuration following a different layout. Installing these harnesses by hand from paper diagrams is slow and prone to error, which is the problem Boeing's AR work has repeatedly targeted.

Iowa State study (2015)

Around 2015, Boeing worked with the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University on a controlled study of AR work instructions for assembly. Participants built a model wing involving more than 50 steps across nearly 30 parts, using one of three guidance methods: a desktop computer showing PDF instructions, a mobile tablet showing the same PDF, or a tablet running AR software that overlaid graphical step-by-step guidance onto the work. Each group assembled the wing twice so the researchers could measure both first-time quality and the learning curve.

The study reported an almost 90 percent improvement in first-time quality between the desktop and AR modes, a reduction in assembly time of around 30 percent with AR, and an average of zero errors per person in the AR group. The results were presented at the ARise '15 conference by Paul Davies of Boeing. The work has been cited frequently as evidence that AR work instructions can reduce errors and build time on complex, first-time tasks.

Production deployment with wearable displays

Boeing moved AR wiring guidance from the lab onto the factory floor using wearable displays. In a deployment built on Google Glass running Upskill's Skylight software, technicians received hands-free, voice-controlled instructions and could use the device's camera and bar-code reading to identify specific wires, call up reference video, and connect to a remote expert through a "see what I see" video link. Boeing senior manager Randall MacPherson said the approach gave the company an opportunity to cut wiring build time by about 25 percent, and the company reported that error rates on the assisted process fell to near zero.

Boeing was also Microsoft's first industrial partner for the Microsoft HoloLens mixed-reality headset, which launched in 2016. With the headset, an electrician can see "ghost" wiring rendered in three-dimensional space and trace it with the actual cables, replacing large printed diagrams with a registered digital overlay.

Astronaut training

Boeing applied virtual reality to spacecraft crew training for its CST-100 Starliner capsule, developed under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. On June 11, 2020, the company said it had conducted what it described as the first-ever astronaut training carried out entirely in virtual reality, using the high-resolution Varjo VR-2 headset.

The VR system let crew members rehearse each phase of a mission to the International Space Station, from prelaunch through docking, undocking, and landing, by interacting with virtual switches and control panels and reading real-time data on the capsule's crew displays. Boeing said the headset's high visual fidelity let astronauts read instruments inside the simulated cockpit, and that training in VR allowed them to practice safety-critical procedures, including docking, and to continue training remotely without travelling between physical simulators. Chris Ferguson, Boeing's first corporate astronaut and a Starliner commander, used the system in preparation for the program's crewed flight test.

Significance to AR and VR

Boeing's wiring-assembly work is one of the earliest examples of industrial augmented reality and is routinely referenced in discussions of Enterprise AR, both for originating the term and for the Iowa State and factory studies that quantified its effect on assembly speed and error rates. Its later use of head-mounted displays for production and of high-resolution VR for spacecraft crew training are cited as examples of how aerospace manufacturers apply virtual reality and mixed reality to high-stakes manufacturing, maintenance, and training tasks.