In order to support the decision-making process of industry on how to implement Augmented Reality (AR) in production, this article wants to provide guidance through a set of comparative user studies. The results are obtained from the feedback of 160 participants who performed the same repair task on a switch cabinet of an industrial robot. The studies compare several AR instruction applications on different display devices (head-mounted display, handheld tablet PC and projection-based spatial AR) with baseline conditions (paper instructions and phone support), both in a single-user and a collaborative setting. Next to insights on the performance of the individual device types for the single mode operation, the study is able to show significant indications on AR techniques are being especially helpful in a collaborative setting.

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Digitization and the growing capabilities of data networks enable companies to perform tasks via remote support, which previously required service personnel to travel. But which mixed reality method leads to better results regarding human factors, grounding and performance criteria? This paper reports on a collaborative user study, in which a local worker is guided by a remote expert with the help of different augmented reality methods. The performed task is an controller exchange in a switch cabinet of an industrial robot, a task rather typical for failure detection within the field. Our study was conducted in collaboration with a technician school of which 50 technician apprentices participated in our study. Our results show clear advantages of using augmented reality (AR) to enable remote support. It further gives significant indications for using a projection based AR method.@en

This work wants to investigate which visualization method is able to support remote teleanalysis of industrial plants best regarding comprehension, usability and situation awareness. The application goal is the remote optimization of an industrial plant and the examined scenario was generated out of a large data set of a real production entity. The plant consists of an industrial manipulator, a molding machine and a montage system. Prior studies on the same plant with video based visualization explored by remote experts showed a large potential for optimization, but indicated a higher demand for situation awareness. In order to test the influence of the visualization method, a user study has been carried out with 60 student participants with six different visualization methods, including various VR and AR implementations. Overall, our used AR environment performed significantly better than the used VR and video implementations, but the VR implementation surpasses AR regarding situation awareness.@en