Human-centric industrial augmented reality: requirements and design guidelines for usability

Industrial Augmented Reality (IAR) gains more traction as a means of improving and enabling human-centric manufacturing operations. IAR does not replace the human operator but rather it promotes a human-centric work system design that empowers users to perform their tasks more easily and effectively. While usabil-ity of IAR solutions improved over the years, it remains an issue preventing wid-er adoption. Therefore, this paper explores the current usability concerns encoun-tered by industry and translates these into a design framework that specifies common requirements and design guidelines. The purpose of this framework is to extend the current understanding of usability in the context of IAR, helping software engineers in designing more usable, intuitive and easily accepted sys-tems. Relevant literature and standards were reviewed to derive preliminary usa-bility requirements. Subsequently, an IAR system prototype was created and val-idated via design science research at a global shipyard operating company. The study identified key design concerns of usable IAR systems, and context-specific ones, such as point selection precision and rendering performance.