Sony and Virgin Atlantic have joined forces with the airline adopting Sony wearable technologies to help its engineers maintain aircraft.

The trial will include Virgin Atlantic's engineers being kitted out with Sony SmartEyeGlass Developer Edition SED-E1 augmented reality headsets - the manufacturer's rival to Google Glass - and a Sony SmartWatch 3. They will also be given Sony tablets and smartphones.

These will be utilised in different ways, with the AR specs being used to take pictures or video of tasks the engineers are undertaking, for study or instruction later. They will also stream video in real time back to the office, in order for additional technical staff to provide further remote assistance.

The SmartWatch 3 can be used to provide engineers with notifications and technical details, including instant feedback if they have a query.

Both devices, along with the smartphones and tablets, will help engineers remain on the craft while working, potentially expediting turnaround time.

Virgin Atlantic has also trialled multiple forms of technology to aid customer satisfaction in the past, including Google Glass on employees in the Upper Class lounge, iBeacon technology to send automatic alerts to iPhones, and Microsoft Windows 8.1 tablets were given to all passengers of a pre-Christmas flight to Boston in order to interact with Santa Claus on the way.

READ: How Virgin Atlantic gave the passengers of flight VS11 a tech Christmas to remember

Pocket-lint was also told by Virgin Atlantic that future innovations will be explored and the Google Glass trial was so successful that it will be greenlighting the project this year.