AR Is Helpful to Tin Can Making Machinery Production Line

Considering it an important opportunity, I wanted to test how AR could help an operator running a Tin can making machinery production line in his daily activities. In collaboration with a client, we started a pilot in the food industry, selecting three use cases not related to maintenance: key performance indicator (KPI) visualization, changeover instruction and traceability. The goal of the pilot was to understand if there was any value in giving an AR tool to the operator, and if this could facilitate his daily activities. We have just very early feedback at the moment, but there are some findings already that I think could be interesting to share:

1. Stay close to the real AR key characteristic. The differentiating value of AR is in how information is presented to the user. It’s superimposed over the “reality.” The values, icons or graphics are anchored to the real object they relate to. In a standard application, you would probably use a valve icon and an ON label to indicate the state of a valve. In AR, you just superimpose the ON label over the valve itself, which makes it easy for the operator to understand. If you just superimpose a flat table with values to the live image of the asset, you are losing of the value you could provide the operator—giving him traditional information with a tool that is more complex to use.
2. Interaction with AR is more complex and time-consuming than with standard mobile apps. This is partially because of the concept of AR itself and partially because of the tools that are available today. We are at the beginning of a journey that will take time and effort. I strongly believe we are at the start of a no-return trip, but we probably have yet to leave the train station. A year ago, of the AR demos were PowerPoint-based. Now we have several examples of applications developed using tablets and glasses. But there is still a lot of work to be done to make these devices really user-friendly, especially glasses. The interaction with the user is still somewhat unnatural and needs to be improved. It will not take much time, but some patience is required. So keep it simple!
3. Before considering the development of any app, ask yourself if you could do it instead in a more traditional way and what real value the new graphical interface will bring to the user. If possible, ask the user as well. Keep in mind that AR doesn’t create information; it just delivers it in a different way. The technological overhead you are introducing needs to have a payback generated from how you present the information. Sometimes this is not really easy to estimate.