AR-glasses-based attention guiding for complex environments: requirements, classification and evaluation

Augmented Reality (AR) based assistance has a huge potential in the context of Industry 4.0: AR links digital information to physical objects and processes in a mobile and, in the case of AR glasses, hands-free way. In most companies, order-picking is still done using paper lists. With the rapid development of AR hardware during the last years, the interest in digitizing picking processes using AR rises. AR-based guiding for picking tasks can reduce the time needed for visual search and reduce errors, such as wrongly picked items or false placements. Choosing the best guiding technique is a non-trivial task: Different environments bring their own inherent constraints and requirements. In the literature, many kinds of guiding techniques were proposed, but the majority of techniques were only compared to non-AR picking assistance. To reveal advantages and disadvantages of AR-based guiding techniques, the contribution of this paper is three-fold: First, an analysis of tasks and environments reveals requirements and constraints on attention guiding techniques which are condensed to a taxonomy of attention guiding techniques. Second, guiding techniques covering a range of approaches from the literature are evaluated in a large-scale picking environment with a focus on task performance and on factors as the users' feeling of autonomy and ergonomics. Finally, a 3D path-based guiding technique supporting multiple goals simultaneously in complex environments is proposed.