To fulfill the promises of Augmented Reality (AR) in the manufacturing and maintenance industry, the development of AR application has to become faster, simpler and cheaper. Since typical AR applications make use of basic functionality like reading markers and displaying simple overlays, a clever combination of such basic building blocks would ease the development of complex AR applications. In this paper, we present a distributed architecture for creating and managing basic AR services, e.g. for information management, user interaction, and documentation. This way, complex AR processes can be orchestrated from those services for being used in different application domains.

Health benefits of physical activity (PA) can be gained if the WHO recommendation for PA are fulfilled regularly. Within families, children are influenced by their social environment. Parents exert a high influence on the health of the family through their own PA behavior and role model function. Due to digitization, new access to PA is possible. These are primarily addressed to the individual by a large number of apps, however these apps do not consider families sufficiently. The aims of this study were to identify the PA and interests for digital components for health promotion, e.g. gamification, of key persons of the health promotion process within families in order to conduct targeted app interventions. 1008 adult family members were recruited for an online survey. The results show that 80.2 % of respondents do not fulfill WHO criteria for PA. Nevertheless, they want to increase their PA, e.g. with endurance and mobility interventions. Outdoor activities are also targeted, whereas institutional sports facilities seem unsuitable for these families. Interestingly, existing gamification elements in an app are of no interest to those respondents who do not meet the WHO criteria. In summary, this study identifies the activity status of parents, shows desirable movement goals in the family and the limits of a health app that can be found in the motivation component, gamification. In order to increase PA, the expansion of health competencies must be focused on and linked with new elements in order to motivational inspire even inactive persons for PA.

Order picking is the process of collecting items from an assortment in inventory. It represents one of the main activities performed in warehouses and accounts for about 60% of the total operational costs of a warehouse. In previous work, we demonstrated the advantages of a head-mounted display (HMD) based picking chart over a traditional text-based pick list, a paper-based graphical pick chart, and a mobile pick-by-voice system. Here we perform two user studies that suggest that adding color cues and context sensing via a laser rangefinder improves picking accuracy with the HMD system. We also examine other variants of the pick chart, such as adding symbols, textual identifiers, images, and descriptions and their effect on accuracy, speed, and subjective usability.

Evaluations of task guidance systems often focus on evaluations of new technologies rather than comparing the nuances of interaction across the various systems. One common domain for task guidance systems is warehouse order picking. We present a method involving an easily reproducible ecologically motivated order picking environment for quantitative user studies designed to reveal differences in interactions. Using this environment, we perform a 12 participant within-subjects experiment demonstrating the advantages of a head-mounted display based picking chart over a traditional text-based pick list, a paper-based graphical pick chart, and a mobile pick-by-voice system. The test environment proved sufficiently sensitive, showing statistically significant results along several metrics with the head-mounted display system performing the best. We also provide a detailed analysis of the strategies adopted by our participants.

Warehouse picking is a traditional part of assembly and inventory control, and several commercial wearable computers address this market. However, head mounted displays (HMDs) are not yet used in these company's products. We present a 16 person user study that compares the efficiency and perceived workload of paper picking lists versus a HMD system aided by contextual cueing. With practice, users of the HMD system made significantly faster picks and made less mistakes related to missing or additional picked items overall.