Guideline and Tool for Designing an Assembly Task Support System Using Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) systems support complex tasks like assembly by overlaying task-related content onto the real world. In recent years, the effort of designing and developing assembly task support systems in AR decreased with the availability of high potential head-mounted displays and provision of integrated development environments. Nevertheless, problems still arise when companies craft an effective AR task support system, particularly in the difficulty of selecting appropriate techniques and information-presentation methods, and the requirements that vary with each use case. In this study, we formulated a corresponding guideline, developed a selection aid tool that incorporates filtering based on the categorization of subtasks and the degree of freedom of available tracking, and evaluated their effectiveness in two experiments. First, to confirm effects on system design, we asked 18 participants to perform the design action of the AR system with the guideline for two tasks (PC assembly and rope work). Consequently, to verify the quality of the designed AR systems from Experiment 1, we asked another set of 20 participants to perform the same tasks with those systems. The results confirm that using the guideline can considerably lower efforts creating media and alleviate the error for a specific process. We envision our guideline and tool to be accessible as an online web page, assisting AR assembly task support system designer/developers worldwide.