Co-Design of an Augmented Reality Maintenance Tool for Gas Pressure Regulation Stations

While augmented reality (AR) gets established in many use cases in the broad field of industrial, education, and entertainment applications, so far, AR has not been used in gas pressure regulation stations (GPRS). In an iterative co-design process, we have developed a first AR prototype to support maintenance work in such GPRS environments. Together with different stakeholders, in particular the technical staff as potential end-users, we discussed and gathered the requirements, observed workers interacting with the AR prototype on-site, and collected feedback, but also identified problems and limitations. Eventually, we deduced two challenging use cases, (i) displaying expandable 3D models of the components built into the station, and (ii) digitizing an inspection form in AR to facilitate the inspection task. We describe the co-design process, its findings, and introduce lessons-learned for the resulting AR prototype.