General Software Platform and Content Description Format for Assembly and Maintenance Task Based on Augmented Reality

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) support systems have proven to be effective in supporting various tasks, but are not yet widely used in real-world applications due to their high development costs. Although several AR authoring tools have been proposed for content development to solve this problem, most AR systems developed with these tools are not compatible with industrial environments and task types, and have inflexible visualization styles. This study provides a systematic solution of combining the AR task support software platform and the general contents description format by expanding the degree of freedom of the visualization methods and improving the design process. The proposed solution adapts to different activities and environments, and optimizes content implementation and user experience. The user study was conducted to evaluate the task performance including processing time and errors and the user experience including the perceived cognitive load and usability of our solution by comparing with a conventional system. The results show that the proposed software platform could improve the compatibility with industrial environments and tasks, and reduce the workload and cognitive effort, although the task performance was the same as the conventional AR system.

Keywords

• augmented reality
• maintenance
• task support
• user interface