An exploration study for augmented and virtual reality enhancing situation awareness for plant teleanalysis

Abstract

This work wants to investigate which visualization method is able to support remote teleanalysis of industrial plants best regarding comprehension, usability and situation awareness. The application goal is the remote optimization of an industrial plant and the examined scenario was generated out of a large data set of a real production entity. The plant consists of an industrial manipulator, a molding machine and a montage system. Prior studies on the same plant with video based visualization explored by remote experts showed a large potential for optimization, but indicated a higher demand for situation awareness. In order to test the influence of the visualization method, a user study has been carried out with 60 student participants with six different visualization methods, including various VR and AR implementations. Overall, our used AR environment performed significantly better than the used VR and video implementations, but the VR implementation surpasses AR regarding situation awareness.