Faster Maintenance with Augmented Reality

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

A U.S. Marine technician wears an augmented-reality headset as he carries out a maintenance task inside an armored vehicle.When you use virtual reality technology not to portray imaginary worlds but to “annotate” the real world, you get augmented reality &mdash which may soon help Marine mechanics carry out repairs:

A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic’s wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions.
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Henderson and Feiner first gathered laser scans and photography of the inside of the vehicle. They built a 3-D model of the vehicle’s cockpit and developed software for directing and instructing users in performing individual maintenance tasks. Ten cameras inside the cockpit were used to track the position of three infrared LEDs attached to the user’s head-worn display. In the future, the team suggests that it may be more practical for cameras or sensors to be worn by the users themselves.

Six participants carried out 18 tasks using the AR system. For comparison, the same participants also used an untracked headset (showing static text instructions and views without arrows or direction to components) and a stationary computer screen with the same graphics and models used in the headset. The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.

(Incidentally, if you read between the lines a bit, the untracked headset was slightly worse than a stationary computer screen.)

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