Abstract
Reliable technical documentation ensures safety in maintenance, assembly, and training. Traditional manuals often use dense text and complex images, making instructions hard to follow. Augmented Reality (AR) for technical documentation enhances procedural guidance, improving document analysis and decision-making. However, its development requires specialized skills, limiting adoption. Clear guidelines and case studies are needed to help non-experts create effective AR documentation. There is no agreed best practice for AR instructions, as effectiveness depends on context.
Our research establishes guidelines for next-gen AR documentation, optimizing instruction templates to enhance clarity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. We aim to improve operator performance while reducing development costs.
We validate our solutions through case studies in laboratory and real work environments, using task time, accuracy, and eye-tracking data, along with usability, cognitive load, and user experience. Our insights enable non-experts to author effective AR documentation for industrial use. At this purpose, we are developing an on-site AR authoring tool, that can help technical writers (that may not are expert in AR development) to create AR documentation, also supporting them with optimized AR visualizations based on the specific working context.
Projects
UPGRADING GOES DIGITAL
(January 2021 – June 2022)
The project aims to convert a manual related to the EUCERK HE-Jr gas radiant strip of the CARLIEUKLIMA company. Augmented Reality will be used for the sections of the technical manual considered to have high added value that include specific activities such as: recognition of components, identification of their functionality, assembly/disassembly instructions.
Main publications
Laviola, E., Gattullo, M., Evangelista, A., Fiorentino, M., & Uva, A. E. (2023). In-situ or side-by-side? A user study on augmented reality maintenance instructions in blind areas. Computers in Industry, 144, 103795.
Laviola, E., Romano, S., Gattullo, M., & Uva, A. E. (2023, November). Evaluating the worker technology acceptance of a mixed reality technical documentation. In International Conference on Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality (pp. 166-180). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Gattullo, M., Evangelista, A., Uva, A. E., Fiorentino, M., & Gabbard, J. L. (2020). What, how, and why are visual assets used in industrial augmented reality? A systematic review and classification in maintenance, assembly, and training (from 1997 to 2019). IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 28(2), 1443-1456.