Towards Wearable Augmented Reality in Automotive Assembly Training

Today, ubiquitous available information is an increasing success factor of industrial enterprises. Mobile Computing allows to manually accessing information, independent from the user’s current location. An additional technology in this context is Wearable Computing. It supports mobile activities by automatically (context-sensitively) gathering and presenting relevant information to the user. Within the wearIT@work project several Wearable Computing applications have been developed in order to demonstrate the overall benefit and maturity of this technology. However, these Wearable Computing applications display information in form of simple text or video. In contrast, Augmented Reality (AR) uses interactive 3D-objects to facilitate the user’s understanding of complex tasks. Combining both technologies in order to exploit their particular capabilities seems promising; not at last, since on a general level differences in their basic technologies can be unveiled hardly. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to enhance Wearable Computing applications with Augmented Reality functionalities. Thereby, the necessary decision making and development processes are standardized and simplified. The approach has been applied to an existing Wearable Computing application in the field of automotive assembly training. We followed the proposed phases resulting in an economically reasonable concept for a Wearable Augmented Reality system that facilitates the trainee’s understanding of complex assembly tasks.