Show Smart
A handheld mixed-reality presentation tool for CLAAS — built to show the invisible side of an agricultural machine: the smart digital systems that the eye can't see, and the mechanical workings that sit inside an enclosed body even when the machine is running.
CLAAS sells to farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs — an audience that's affectionately known in the trade as "tire-kickers." The point of the phrase is that this audience evaluates machines by walking up to them, touching them, climbing on them, trying them. They already know what a combine, a tractor or a forage harvester does. What's harder to convey is *how* it does it.
Two layers of the modern machine are not directly observable. The smart digital systems — the sensors, the automation logic, the data behaviour that increasingly defines the performance promise — have no visible form. And the mechanical workings — the threshing system, the moving flaps, the rotors and screens — sit inside an enclosed body even when the machine is running, in the field or on a stage. Show Smart was developed to put both of those invisible layers in front of the audience that values touching the machine, in a way the audience can follow.
A real CLAAS machine is on the stage. The presenter holds an iPad with the camera pointed at the machine, and the iPad's screen shows the same machine — augmented in real time with data overlays, animated technical layers and explanatory content placed exactly where they belong on the physical object. The audience sees the iPad's view on a large LED behind the stage, in a live video stream, or both. The presenter can switch from the augmented real machine to a 1:1 fully virtual version of it — and the virtual machine can be taken apart on the stage. The threshing system can be pulled out of the combine, the audience taken inside it, the grain flow shown with the flaps in motion, and the behaviour varied across different harvesting situations — all fully animated, scaled however the explanation needs. The same tool moves between augmenting the visible machine and opening up the parts that are normally enclosed, depending on what the audience needs to understand.
The iPad is the deliberate choice. It is small enough that the presenter holds it the way they'd hold any other tool, and gestures with it the way they'd point at the machine without it. All gestures and selections register on the audience-side display, so the audience can see what the presenter is doing to control the visualisation — the controls and cues are visible alongside the result. Watching a presenter use Show Smart looks like watching a craftsperson use a tool: the action is legible, not hidden inside a complicated stack of media technology.
Show Smart runs as a self-contained system on the iPad for smaller settings — a sales conversation on a farm, a one-to-one demonstration — and offloads rendering to a connected workstation for larger shows where the visual quality has to match a full stage production. CLAAS product experts were part of the development as users, not just reviewers, so the gestures and the workflow match how the team actually presents. HowTo videos cover setup and operation, which lets the team deploy and run the system independently across markets.
Show Smart is in continuous use across CLAAS's presentation programme — press conferences, trade-show stages, and one-to-one farm visits — wherever the smart and mechanical layers of a machine need to be opened up for the audience.
The tool puts the invisible side of agricultural machinery in front of an audience that prefers to evaluate by touch, and does it without removing the presenter from the conversation. The presenter is still the one explaining the machine; the iPad is what lets them show, not just tell.
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