Augmented Reality for Remote Assistance (ARRA)

Augmented Reality (AR) reduces the technicians’ cognitive effort mainly resulting in both time and error rate reductions. Still, its application in remote assistance has not been fully explored yet. This paper focuses on understanding the benefits of providing assistance to a remote technician through AR. Augmented Reality for Remote Assistance (ARRA) has been designed and developed for local novice maintainer to request assistance and communicate with a remote expert. The remote expert can manipulate virtual objects, which are then overlaid on the real environment of the novice maintainer. ARRA has been tested with the help of 60 participants. This involved performing an assembly/disassembly operation on a mock-up of a piping system. The participants were remotely assisted through ARRA or video-call. Quantitative spatial referencing error data has been collected. The results showed a 30% improvement in terms of spatial referencing when utilizing ARRA as remote assistance support as opposed to video-call. Future studies should investigate into quantifying the improvements due to other factors involved in remote assistance, especially language barriers and connectivity issues.