While augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have been in the limelight for many years, they are mostly making headlines for exciting new applications in the consumer realm. However, a closer look shows they have made tangible progress in non-consumer areas like smart factory environments.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced the industry to reevaluate manufacturing processes for safer and more efficient production methods. As a result, AR and VR technologies have been employed to improve plant operations and train workers through an interactive experience between people and a real-world environment where objects from a physical setting are presented and enhanced by perceptual information from a computer.
Besides consumer applications, such as wearables and head-up displays, AR solutions are now available for manufacturing operations where they enrich real environments with valuable data to enable digital manipulation and interaction between the actual world and the augmented surroundings.