Augmented Reality Guidance for Car Repairs: immediate and long-term Effects

Abstract

Car service technicians are challenged by the increasing variety and complexity of repair and maintenance tasks. Recent studies have shown benefits by using augmented reality (AR) for different industrial tasks. Most studies compared a very established support technology with the new AR support in just one initial exposure. The lack of routine in dealing with AR often creates a respective disadvantage. This paper looks into the question to which extent can AR head-mounted display (AR HMD) guidance provide benefits for an unknown car repair task. To investigate further than an initial exposure, the service technicians repeated the specific task every twoweeks in total four times. The experiment under field conditions compares the efficiency, the repair quality, and the mental effort under AR HMD support to the traditional repair guideline. Results indicated that AR HMD support impacts positive the repair quality immediately and long term. Furthermore, the AR HMD support created a decent learning environment, that the high quality also remained without AR guidance. This shows opportunities to use AR HMDs for training and guidance of industrial tasks in practice.