Towards a Mobile Augmented Reality Prototype for Corporate Training

TOWARDS A MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY PROTOTYPE FOR CORPORATE TRAINING Maintenance and repair skills can be very complex. Traditional methods of training may not have potential to meet future trends in maintenance and repair. In the light of this, Augmented Reality (AR) is a very promising application of an emerging technology, combining virtual environment with the real world, to support procedural tasks in corporate training. Since AR-based training is directly linked to physical objects/devices of the training context, where some additional information are overlaid onto a real world context, maintenance and repair skills could benefit from the implementation of AR in training programs and users could take advantage by using this new technology while performing job tasks. In this paper, we present an ongoing research, concerning the application of Augmented Reality technology to e-learning system for corporate training purposes. The first step of our research consists of the development of an Augmented Reality Web App for maintenance and repair training purposes, which will be useful to aid the user in the execution of some procedural tasks. In order to achieve our goal, we engaged a worldwide elevators company: Sematic-Wittur, which is volunteer participating to some phased of the research. After the development of the Web App, hands-on and evaluating test sessions will involve a focus group of the company. Moreover, our research will go one step further by analysing the efficacy of AR in corporate training in comparison with the evaluation of other training methods in the same field. Finally, the collected data will be analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Our ongoing research aims to figure out if corporate training would get a valuable help from the implementation of AR in training programs, seeking to explore the advantages of the use of this new technology in maintenance contexts’ needs. In this paper, we begin from a theoretical framework on AR, we describe how we apply AR to training purposes and we explore the potential of AR, looking at the initial results of our ongoing research and at the work that is still to be done.