Digitizing Human Work Places in Manufacturing Through Augmented and Mixed Reality

It is no longer obvious that the share of knowledge work in production environments is increasing. However, this is not the only reason why more attention needs to be paid to the human factor in production. It is therefore increasingly important to provide workers in a production environment with the best possible support for their knowledge tasks by using modern information and communication technologies. In particular, the technical innovations in terms of augmented and mixed reality offer a great potential to be implemented in relevant applications in connection with the ongoing digitization or digital transformation of production. Against this background, this paper shows how current knowledge-based work processes in production environments can be best supported by augmented and mixed reality technologies. For this purpose, the paper reviews the state of the art of augmented and mixed reality technologies and then outlines in two concrete industrial use cases from the manufacturing domain how human work can be digitally augmented to facilitate knowledge-intensive production tasks.