Assembling specialized manufactured equipment, like aircraft, requires advanced production skills that can take years of training and experience to master. Training new workers is often labor intensive and expensive for specialized manufacturing companies. Traditionally, product assembly training in the manufacturing industry predominantly focuses on methods such as textbook learning, and more recently, video guidance. Recent technological advances in Virtual Reality (VR) devices, however, have introduced technology with the potential to improve the current training system. Studies show that VR, training can decrease assembly errors, production cost, and time. Unfortunately, in the past these VR devices were too expensive and required extensive programming knowledge to create a training application. The release of commercial virtual reality (VR) head mounted displays (HMD) and easy to use game engines like Unity 3D has taken steps towards solving this issue. However, because of the recentness of virtual reality's commercial availability, research on training interfaces in manufacturing environments is limited. This paper develops a prototype training system to test the viability of using a VR HMD as an assembly training tool. The hope moving forward is that, as this technology matures, these tools and lessons learned can be used to improve the training process.
Emma R. Dodoo, Brittney Hill, Austin Garcia, Adam Kohl, Anastacia MacAllister, Jonathan Schlueter, Eliot Winer, "Evaluating Commodity Hardware and Software for Virtual Reality Assembly Training" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, 2018, pp 468-1 - 468-6, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2018.03.ERVR-468