Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Training Environment for Industrial Assembly Tasks

Due to its interactive and intuitive nature, Virtual Reality has great potential for training of industrial assembly procedures. Training in a virtual environment is potentially easier, safer and cheaper than real-world training and it allows fast switching between training scenarios. A lot of research has been done in this area, mostly conducting evaluations in laboratory settings with abstract use cases. This paper describes our implementation of a virtual training application, which was developed for a real, complex assembly in cooperation with an industry partner. The application features a guided training, which allows users to practice the assembly of complex products step by step in a virtual environment. An interactive exploded view enables the exploration of individual parts in context to the model. In addition, a sectional view tool reveals the internal structure of an assembly. The application offers collaborative tools for trainers to monitor and support the progress. A content authoring tool allows the creation and modification of training scenarios. First feedback from a qualitative study shows positive feedback from users. They appreciated the intuitive use of visual and haptic feedback for interaction. Our tests also reveals that some steps are challenging to train virtually and therefore certain simplifications are necessary. VR will not replace traditional training, but the tools described in this paper may provide a useful addition to current solutions in industry and learning factories.