Augmented Reality in Industry 4.0

Since the origins of Augmented Reality (AR), industry has always been one of its prominent application domains. The recent advances in both portable and wearable AR devices and the new challenges introduced by the fourth industrial revolution (renowned as industry 4.0) further enlarge the applicability of AR to improve the productiveness and to enhance the user experience. This paper provides an overview on the most important applications of AR regarding the industry domain. Key among the issues raised in this paper are the various applications of AR that enhance the user's ability to understand the movement of mobile robot, the movements of a robot arm and the forces applied by a robot. It is recommended that, in view of the rising need for both users and data privacy, technologies which compose basis for Industry 4.0 will need to change their own way of working to embrace data privacy

Vocal One Switch (VOS) selection interfaces for Virtual and Augmented Reality hands-free tasks

Several virtual and augmented reality tasks involve users in hands-free interactions; in this case, speech-based systems are often preferred for their intuitiveness and naturalness. On the other hand, the robustness of this kind of interfaces can be an issue, thus affecting both the usability and the user experience, when they are used in noisy environments. This paper proposes a one switch interface triggered by vocal commands: three different scanning algorithms are tested. With this kind of interface users can sequentially select the desired command, thus improving the robustness of traditional speech recognition-based interfaces. Latency time is an issue for one switch interfaces, but it is shown how a bidirectional scanning algorithm based on a non binary switch can strongly mitigate this problem. Vocal one switch (VOS) interfaces are compared with a traditional multi-word speech interface both objectively (in terms of robustness and efficiency) and subjectively (user feedback)