Ethnographic study of a commercially available augmented reality HMD app for industry work instruction

Abstract

Industrial applications of Augmented Reality (AR) are becoming increasingly commonplace but there are only a small number of published user studies examining the use of commercially available AR technologies, like AR HMDs, with real workers in real industry settings. This paper presents ethnographic research of an industry task that includes the context of the industry procedure, pain-points with current methods and a user experience study of an HMD-delivered AR application for delivering work instructions to support engineers performing the procedure. The AR application is delivered to engineers with different levels of experience through a commercially-available AR HMD (the DAQRI Smart Glasses®). Engineers (users) were observed and video recorded by researchers as they performed the procedure in the real-world setting of a sprinkler room of a hospital in the Netherlands. Engineers who used AR were found to deviate less from the correct procedure in comparison to an engineer who performed sprinkler maintenance using the current industry method, without AR instruction. Errors made by engineers on the procedure, together with semi-structured interview responses, shed light on customer pain points that AR can alleviate, useful UX/UI design considerations, barriers to adoption and insights for informing larger scale user evaluations of industry AR from maintenance to manufacturing.