Conveying Procedural and Descriptive Knowledge with Augmented Reality.

Repairing or maintaining technical systems requires procedural knowledge. When dealing with complex problems, solid descriptive knowledge is also necessary to understand unexpected system states. Consequently, service technicians are taught both descriptive knowledge on product technology as well as procedural knowledge; the first in a theoretical way, the second typically in practical trainings. In the past, augmented reality (AR) training has been proposed for both aspects individually. Here we investigate initial AR training for joint theoretical and practical training. In an experiment under field conditions, this paper compares an initial AR training to conventional personal training for previously unknown repair and maintenance tasks. Our results show that the initial AR training resulted in similar outcomes for short-term and long-term memory of descriptive knowledge compared to the conventional training. Looking at the practical training part, AR outperforms conventional training regarding completion time, repair, and process quality. The results show that AR can provide an alternative to conventional training for unknown repair and maintenance tasks and thus can save financial resources, such as personnel costs (trainer) and costs for physical systems.