Legibility in Industrial AR: Text Style, Color Coding, and Illuminance

Abstract

T he creation of leading-edge options for interaction between people and technology plays a key role in the Industrie 4.0 vision, which calls for intelligent resources that enable and support decentralized, reaction-driven, and flexible production systems. In this context, augmented reality (AR) is one of the most suitable solutions. However, it is still not ready to be effectively used in industry, and one crucial problem is the legibility of text seen through AR headworn displays (HWDs). An overarching goal of our work has been to validate AR as an improvement over current practices in industrial maintenance and assembly operations, along the lines of Pierre FiteGeorgel's work (see the sidebar "A Survey of Industrial Augmented Reality Applications"). 1 Early in our exploratory phases, we performed a pilot test using video-based AR with a large screen display near the operator workbench and a combination of multiple fixed and mobile cameras (see Figure 1). Participants performed similar operations via two modalities: paper manuals and AR instructions. We found that the large screen AR instructions significantly reduced participants' overall performance time and error rate. We assumed that the main additional benefits were due to hands-free operation.We also posited that AR HWDs could further improve operator performance by reducing completion times and head and neck movements. Maintenance operations are divided-attention tasks that require operators to repeatedly switch between instructions and their work area. Using traditional manuals or even a large-screen setup, operators must continuously move their heads and chain their lines of sight. On the contrary, with AR HWDs, instructions and the work area are collocated because information is always presented within the operator's field of view.Recently, we have been examining HWD legibility in real industrial settings. The perception of a stimulus (such as text) is affected by both the contrasting luminance and the texture of the stimulus and the background. Thus, AR text discrimination, and therefore legibility, is likely affected by these two factors. In industrial contexts, other aspects may also affect the perceived contrast of AR text, including workspace background, text color, and ambient lighting.To address this problem, a promising approach for industrial applications is to maximize text contrast in real time via software by adding outlines or billboard backgrounds around the text. To examine this hypothesis, we ran four user studies to examine the legibility of text seen through AR HWDs using typical industrial backgrounds, Augmented reality (AR) has numerous applications in industrial settings, but a crucial problem is the legibility of text seen through AR headworn displays. The authors test several variables affecting text legibility and derive guidelines with an emphasis on deriving guidelines to support AR interface designers. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 53color coding, and lighting levels. In this article, we briefly describe each study...

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