Augmented Reality-based factory planning - an application tailored to industrial needs

Over the past years, a variety of augmented reality (AR)-based applications were created, to support industrial processes. Although these first demonstrator applications or prototypes cover all parts of the industrial product process (design, planning and production, service and maintenance), only a few of them actually turned into established and applied solutions. In the automotive industry, one successful field for AR-based applications is factory design and planning, metaio and Volkswagen Group Research have concerted their research work to continuously enhance a first prototype in order to create a serviceable and accepted software tool, which is tailored to the needs of AR-based factory planning processes. This paper presents the developing process of this application, the requirements analysis and the realization as a complete system. A concrete example in industry describes the usage of the system for factory planning and an outlook on future work in this area closes the document.