Testing Augmented Reality Systems for Spotting Sub-Surface Impurities

To limit musculoskeletal disorders we are working towards implementing collaborative robotics in strenuous or repetitive production work. Our objective is to evaluate augmented reality (AR) devices for assisting in near-distance tasks before applying and testing the displays in the context of human-robot collaboration in a production setting. This chapter describes the hardware setup and procedure for testing AR systems for showing sub-surface positions of foreign elements in an opaque mass. The goal is it test four types of setup in terms of user accuracy and speed, the four setups being a head-mounted see-through display, a mounted tablet-based see-through display, top-down surface projection and overlays on a static monitor. The experiment is carried out using a tracked HTC Vive controller with a needle attachment. Precision tasks are performed by 48 participants and each display is evaluated using the System Usability Scale and the NASA Task Load Index.