Adopting augmented reality in the age of industrial digitalisation

Industrial augmented reality (IAR) is one of the key pillars of the industrial digitalisation concepts, which connects workers with the physical world through overlaying digital information. Augmented reality (AR) market is increasing but still its adoption levels are low in industry. While companies strive to learn and adopt AR, there are chances that they fail in such endeavours due to lack of understanding key challenges and success factors in this space. This study identifies critical success factors and challenges for IAR implementation projects based on field experiments. The broadly used technology, organisation, environment (TOE) framework was used as a theoretical basis for the study, while 22 experiments were conducted for validation. It is found that, while technological aspects are of importance, organisational issues are more relevant for industry, which has not been reflected to the same extent in the literature.No funding source. 22 experiments were conducted with in-kind support (employee time and company access) from Beckhoff Automation, Herman Miller and fluiconnecto as well as University of Cambridge students (see Table 1)

Augmented reality in support of intelligent manufacturing – A systematic literature review

Industry increasingly moves towards digitally enabled ‘smart factories’ that utilise the internet of things (IoT) to realise intelligent manufacturing concepts like predictive maintenance or extensive machine to machine communication. A core technology to facilitate human integration in such a system is augmented reality (AR), which provides people with an interface to interact with the digital world of a smart factory. While AR is not ready yet for industrial deployment in some areas, it is already used in others. To provide an overview of research activities concerning AR in certain shop floor operations, a total of 96 relevant papers from 2011 to 2018 are reviewed. This paper presents the state of the art, the current challenges, and future directions of manufacturing related AR research through a systematic literature review and a citation network analysis. The results of this review indicate that the context of research concerning AR gets increasingly broader, especially by addressing challenges when implementing AR solutions.No funding was received