Augmented Reality and Its Application

Augmented Reality (AR) is a discipline that includes the interactive experience of a real-world environment, in which real-world objects and elements are enhanced using computer perceptual information. It has many potential applications in education, medicine, and engineering, among other fields. This book explores these potential uses, presenting case studies and investigations of AR for vocational training, emergency response, interior design, architecture, and much more

Empowering entrepreneurial mindsets - The modern era of incubation : A qualitative analysis of the entrepreneurial support environment at German universities

Over the past few decades, there has been an increasing amount of academic literature recognizing the significance of innovation systems. Entrepreneurship is an important component of an innovation system, contributing to the enhancement of regional as well as national innovation. The transfer of knowledge and technology between science and the economy has become particularly important to reinforce overall innovation performance. Today, universities and other institutions of higher education play a crucial role in the system of innovation and have evolved as active and highly relevant participants in the innovation system. Therefore, various supportive measures have been developed to increase the level of innovation at universities and to drive entrepreneurial activities. However, due to the ever-growing entrepreneurial support environment and the great variety of support programs,the distinction between support measures has become unclear. Consequently, the main objective of the present research work is to contribute to the overall understanding of supportive measures at German universities and other institutions of higher education. Eight experts were interviewed to ensure the compilation of meaningful data. The research findings highlight the importance of a solid network of external experts as well as collaboration with other entrepreneurial institutions. Moreover, the research results indicated that an organizational structure with decentralized decision-making processes and a greater scope of actions enhances operational efficiency. While considering the indistinctness of different support programs and specific terms, although some significant differences were evaluated, overall, the results present a clear tendency toward a more cautious use of specialist terms, therefore substantiating the missing preciseness

Understanding VR/AR in marketing & sales for B2B: an explorative study

Abstract. The research explored the impact of immersive reality technologies, particularly VR and AR, in marketing and sales for the B2B sector. Study interests were fuelled by both an industrial hype and vehement investments on these technologies, especially in the last five years. However, the potential of these technologies is still unexplored and widely misunderstood by businesses as the innovations are slowly taking off. Additionally, existing literature showed a need to clearly define various simulated realities in the continuum, including VR and AR, as well as a general misunderstanding of the potential of immersive reality technologies, and a shortage of studies covering holistically different VR/AR applications in marketing, especially for the B2B sector. Therefore, this research aims to bridge the gap between managerial and academic’ understanding by providing a holistic framework explaining the impact of immersive reality technologies in B2B marketing and sales and provide a clear distinction between VR and AR in the Virtuality-reality continuum. This research also aims to assist marketers and managers in embracing these technologies to better meet the needs of future generations. The study adopted a qualitative exploratory approach allowing researchers to gain an in-depth understanding of the topic from an industrial perspective. The study used an abductive thematic analysis approach to analyse empirical results and ten semi-structured interviews with eleven VR/AR providers for primary data collection. Results were structured based on four main themes, namely: VR and AR definitions, customer technology adoption factors, VR/AR impact and applications on B2B marketing, and last, VR/AR impact on sales performance outcomes. This study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a tentative definition for each terminology “VR” and “AR” separately that merges academic perspectives and industry insights. Overall, empirical study suggests that immersive reality technologies can affect both marketing activities and sales performance outcomes for the B2B sector. However, successfully embracing these technologies calls for collaboration to overcome financial, technical and social barriers while also enhancing aspects like the user experience to step out of the still immature VR/AR market. VR and AR together have an impact on marketing for B2B by enhancing customization, non-verbal communication, learning and experiential marketing while also creating memorable experiences that stick in the minds of the consumer. Concerning the customer’s purchasing journey, this study extends existing literature to cover all customer purchasing stages, including the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. Results emphasize the pre-purchase phase as the most impacted by immersive reality technologies, followed by post-purchase and purchase stages, respectively. Finally, this study suggests that the use of VR/AR as sales support tools can yield positive efficiency returns through higher task performance and a reduction in sales-related costs, and positive effectiveness returns through greater customer and social engagement, stronger collaborative business relationships and the enhancement of proactive (sales planning) and reactive (adaptive selling) behaviours in the sales process

Integration of digital twin to augmented reality in industrial enrichment plants:an anticipated user experience study

Abstract. Understanding user experience is necessary in developmental phases of every service, program and system. However, when adopting new technology, the early developmental phases methods and metrics used in user experience are not sufficient in anticipation of situational use and use cases of users. Therefore, focus and perspective to anticipated user experience research early in the development phase is needed. These problems are also true in ubiquitous computing field of Industry 4.0 where human computer interaction is in constant flux. New types of technologies and solutions are emerging and constantly seeking ways to capture their market share, bring added value or to revolutionize the industrial field without first understanding the anticipated requirements. This is true also for different industrial process control applications like digital twins and ways that augmented reality could be utilized in the on-site and monitoring operations. This thesis determines what the anticipated user experiences are for the professionals working in the industry and how applications can be integrated to augmented reality in industrial contexts. To tackle this issues artifact and gamification as design method will be utilized. Anticipated user experience study approach is applied and combined with early developmental artifact in the interviews. Research data is collected both qualitatively and quantitatively, but the main research method and data analysis is implemented with qualitative data. Contributions of this thesis is to determine if the use of early developmental artifact helps with the anticipations of user experiences and use cases for new technology adaptations to augmented reality in industrial contexts. This thesis proposes the term artifact specificity constraint and contributes to a model for converged relations of virtual reality continuum and digital twins. This thesis outlays a coding scheme with nine categories to be used as a reference for similar focused research

A digital excellence for supporting resilient implementation of Erasmus+ Joint Capacity Building Projects in the Field of Higher Education of Uzbekistan

The CBHE Projects within the Erasmus Program are fostering revolutionary social reforms in Uzbekistan, stimulating development and implementation of new study programs, empowering structural reforms for reliable and sustainable Higher Education System. A resilient support powered by digital services can multiply the positive effect, thus boosting the reforms. The paper describes and discusses a positive experience, collected during implementation of the Erasmus Plus ELBA Project, which can be used by the creative groups of the universities, who propose and implement their own initiative

Developing a system for health and safety enhancement and automation in construction sites

The construction industry forms an important element within the economic activities and is known to be challenging and dangerous. Erroneously construction site accidents were accepted as unavoidable. The existing work health and safety protocols goals were not to cut risk but to provide risk assessment by understanding the types of risks associated with various activities and setting out rules and procedures to manage them and cut their impact. This study attempts a proactive approach to construction site health and safety by anticipating the hazards associated with a planned daily work activity and providing on site the relevant training and safety instructions. This was achieved by integrating the project’s digital design with site images processing and analysis. Digital image processing applies signal processing algorithms to images and videos resulting in extracting useful information from them. An essential and critical issue in the field of computer vision is the object’s recognition methods which should be capable of finding the partial occlusion of objects. Knowledge management systems archive and locate the required information and make it available to the relevant destination quickly and efficiently. It can also provide access to information in other construction sites and to the design team. This management system helps to save the gained experience and make it available to the project or other similar projects. The Building Information System was introduced as a system in which the objectives of this study can be incorporated leaving the door open to incorporate other project management activities. The possible solutions for the identified health and safety business problem were analysed in order to arrive at the best solution suitable to the objectives of the study. The end users ‘needs obtained from the distributed questionnaire and the project’s functional requirements were considered in order to create a model that will achieve their goals in an efficient manner. An activity diagram and a user case diagram based on the UML language were generated. Based on them a computerized model (CONSTRUCTION AUTOMATA) was developed to identify risks associated with specific work activities and provide the relevant safety instructions and training to mitigate them. The model automatically produces safety reports to record and serve as a knowledge management base for future reference thus eliminating possible human errors. The computer program was tested with available site images from an existing project and it proved to deliver its outputs according to its design. The developed model was then demonstrated to a selected group of relevant professionals and was seen to score well with ease of use mark of (6.17) and effectiveness as a health and safety tool mark of (6.37) out of a total mark of (10)

Supporting Career Development and Employment: Benefits Planning, Assistance and Outreach (BPA&O) and Protection and Advocacy for Beneficiaries of Social Security (PABSS)

This training curriculum is dedicated to increasing knowledge and understanding of the Social Security Administration\u27s disability and return to work programs and work incentive provisions as prescribed in the Social Security Act and Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999 as well as other federal benefit programs. These informational resources were compiled and edited to provide continuing education and print materials for benefits specialists and protection and advocacy personnel on the interplay of these benefit programs and impact or employment

Human factors in instructional augmented reality for intravehicular spaceflight activities and How gravity influences the setup of interfaces operated by direct object selection

In human spaceflight, advanced user interfaces are becoming an interesting mean to facilitate human-machine interaction, enhancing and guaranteeing the sequences of intravehicular space operations. The efforts made to ease such operations have shown strong interests in novel human-computer interaction like Augmented Reality (AR). The work presented in this thesis is directed towards a user-driven design for AR-assisted space operations, iteratively solving issues arisen from the problem space, which also includes the consideration of the effect of altered gravity on handling such interfaces.Auch in der bemannten Raumfahrt steigt das Interesse an neuartigen Benutzerschnittstellen, um nicht nur die Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion effektiver zu gestalten, sondern auch um einen korrekten Arbeitsablauf sicherzustellen. In der Vergangenheit wurden wiederholt Anstrengungen unternommen, Innenbordarbeiten mit Hilfe von Augmented Reality (AR) zu erleichtern. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich auf einen nutzerorientierten AR-Ansatz, welcher zum Ziel hat, die Probleme schrittweise in einem iterativen Designprozess zu lösen. Dies erfordert auch die Berücksichtigung veränderter Schwerkraftbedingungen