An approach to preparing hand gesture maintenance training based on Virtual Reality

Overview & Synopsis

Over the last decade, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been evolving rapidly. VR environments and devices are more and more powerful and enable exceptional user experiences. Such environments and devices have a huge potential in a wide variety of industrial applications, in particular in maintenance training. Industry, however, still has difficulties achieving satisfactory training results, mainly due to inappropriate choices and setups of VR-based training infrastructures. In order to systematically support the preparation process of VR-based maintenance trainings, this thesis proposes a holistic concept for preparing VR-based maintenance training sequences with a focus on experimenting with, and evaluating and comparing different VR setups and configurations. This concept is called “Virtual Reality technology for Training Preparation Process” (VR-TPP), and it has been implemented for validation in both non-immersive and fully-immersive setups. Within those, three different case studies demonstrate how this systematic approach supports trainees in finding out the appropriate working process and hand gestures, as well as trainers in determining the most appropriate training environment, sequence and work instructions. In order to account for specificities in maintenance training operations, a particular focus has been directed on properly capturing hand gestures and associating them with different types of mechanical joints and the disassembly of mechanical parts according to their appropriateness. This is considered an important contribution to upgrading, complementing or even replacing traditional work instructions without active user involvement to virtual work instructions providing user experience. Furthermore, the use of the VR-TPP concept also helps revealing the cause of mistakes that users make when working in a virtual environment. From these insights, the learnings can be fed back into the design of the training process as well as the infrastructure. Apart from industrial maintenance (therefore assembly- and disassembly-) trainings, the concept enables and supports numerous other applications.