Abstract Order picking is one of the most important process steps in logistics. Because of their flexibility, human beings cannot be replaced by machines. But if workers, in order, picking systems are equipped with a head‐mounted display, Augmented Reality can improve the information visualization. In this paper, the development of such a system—called Pick‐by‐Vision—is presented. The system is evaluated in a user study performed in a real storage environment. Important logistics figures as well as the subjective strain were measured. The results show that a Pick‐by‐Vision system can considerably improve industrial order picking processes.

In this paper we report on our ongoing studies around the application of augmented reality methods to support the order picking process of logistics applications. Order picking is the gathering of goods out of a prepared range of items following some customer orders. We named the visual support of this order picking process using head-mounted displays ldquopick-by-visionrdquo. This work presents the case study of bringing our previously developed pick-by-vision system from the lab to an experimental factory hall to evaluate it under more realistic conditions. This includes the execution of two user studies. In the first one we compared our pick-by-vision system with and without tracking to picking using a paper list to check picking performance and quality in general. In a second test we had subjects using the pick-by-vision system continuously for two hours to gain in-depth insight into the longer use of our system, checking user strain besides the general performance. Furthermore, we report on the general obstacles of trying to use HMD-based AR in an industrial setup and discuss our observations of user behaviour.