Using Augmented Reality in Manufacturing: What is Missing?
In the manufacturing industry, Augmented Reality (AR) has been shown to improve workers' performance in various tasks such as training, assembly, maintenance, etc. For this reason, it is at the heart of the 4th Industrial Revolution and has the potential to revolutionise this industry. But why is AR adoption in manufacturing so low despite all these benefits?
In essence, AR allows the overlay of virtual content on the real world. In other words, it means that workers using a safety helmet equipped with an AR screen can see instructions to operate a machine over it. Thus, without diverting their attention from the object. Despite these promising applications, data from the United Kingdom government indicates that only 5.5% of AR companies in the UK operate in the manufacturing industry.
There are different contributing factors to this low adoption. When we analysed the perception decision-maker stakeholders have about this technology, we observed they see AR as a technology that is complex to work with and correlating it with industry problems is challenging. Moreover, when we looked at how AR has been used when integrated with daily operations, we learned that this complexity makes AR difficult and expensive to personalise to address the companies’ problems.
Complex Technology: When we talked with decision-makers in the manufacturing industry, we learned they see the enormous potential AR has to benefit their companies. However, they find AR complex. Less than one third of them told us they know where to start if they were supposed to implement and use AR today. Less than 40% of them are confident of the specific problems in their companies that AR can solve.
Lack of personalisation: Numerous AR applications are available in the market targeting the manufacturing industry. A company can buy or subscribe to one of them starting at US$ 125 per worker. However, most showed limited personalisation capabilities, which means they are too rigid to adapt to more general industry scenarios. Because of that, these applications are generally used in pilot tests and not prolonged use. No case study was found showing that any application was deployed in regular operation.
On the other hand, companies that deployed AR in regular operations developed their own applications. It means they were personalised to their needs and adjusted whenever necessary. This characteristic allowed them to use AR for extended periods of time. However, this approach is significantly more expensive, which becomes impractical for small and medium size enterprises.
The People-Led Approach: By putting people at the centre, it was possible to understand these barriers to AR adoption in manufacturing and reflect on potential solutions. One is a framework to help the manufacturing industry identify the needs they have that AR can address and suggest the features an AR application must have to solve these needs. It will also include an AR application that has a content creation tool, which allows people with no programming skills to personalise the AR application to meet their needs.
Augmented Reality is an exciting technology with the potential to impact the manufacturing industry, but it still needs some work to become more widespread.
Additional Resources
Author’s profile
Dr Rafael Roberto is an Associate Researcher in Digital Innovation at the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation. His research focuses on people-centred approaches to identify real-world needs that can be solved using emerging and deep technologies.
If you would like further information on this research please email: p-ld@bath.ac.uk
