Developing Killer Apps for Industrial Augmented Reality Projects in VR

Ivan Sutherland’s experiments in the 1960s, AR didn’t gain real footing as a technical field until the early 1990s. For example, that’s when David Mizell developed the first industrial AR application with his colleagues at Boeing. By the end of that decade, interest in AR had grown considerably—motivated in the US mostly by military considerations, in Japan by art and entertainment, and in Europe by industrial applications. A series of publications in newly organized augmented and mixed reality workshops and symposia documented these trends. Because governments and the entertainment industry funded much of the academic research, many publications focused on topics that interested these groups. This meant that publications covering AR’s industrial applications were largely lacking. The largest industrial AR (IAR) consortium was funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research organization, which supported the Augmented Reality for Development, Production, and Servicing (known by the German acronym ARVIKA). AS a consortium that included numerous industrial partners, ARVIKA’s emergence is an important milestone in establishing IAR’s importance and attracting industries—in particular, the German automobile industry—to its applications. Even though this consortium produced numerous patents, only a handful of scientific publications appeared in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. (A final report presenting the summary of results obtained by each partner is written in German and might be translated into English in the near future.) ARVIKA’s main achievement was to incite industry to form R&D groups that would study industrial applications of AR and build prototype systems. Research groups from other countries such as Sweden, Australia, Japan, and the US, among other countries, have also presented some IAR-related research work (see references in http://wwwnavab.in.tum.de/CGA). The European community also funded several projects—including the Service and Training through Augmented Reality (STAR) program—to encourage IAR research and development. In the next few years, we will see whether the IAR community can provide satisfactory end-to-end solutions and whether industry will adopt and commercialize these solutions. Each industrial process imposes its own peculiar requirements. This creates the need for specialized technical solutions, which in turn poses new sets of challenges. Because most industries must concern themselves with at least some of these industrial procedures, let’s consider design, commissioning, manufacturing, quality control, training, monitoring and control, and service and maintenance.