Working with Augmented Reality?: A Long-Term Analysis of In-Situ Instructions at the Assembly Workplace

Abstract

Due to increasing complexity of products and the demographic change at manual assembly workplaces, interactive and context-aware instructions for assembling products are becoming more and more important. Over the last years, many systems using head-mounted displays (HMDs) and in-situ projection have been proposed. We are observing a trend in assistive systems using in-situ projection for supporting workers during work tasks. Recent advances in technology enable robust detection of almost every work step, which is done at workplaces. With this improvement in robustness, a continuous usage of assistive systems at the workplace becomes possible. In this work, we provide results of a long-term study in an industrial workplace with an overall runtime of 11 full workdays. In our study, each participant assembled at least three full workdays using in-situ projected instructions. We separately considered two different user groups comprising expert and untrained workers. Our results show a decrease in performance for expert workers and a learning success for untrained workers.