Industrial xReality (XR) : Design, Application Scenarios, and Adoption Strategy in the Context of Industrial Maintenance

Abstract

Emerging xReality (XR) technology, which encompasses Augmented and Virtual realities (AR and VR), blurs the borders between real and virtual, opening a yet undefined spectrum of benefits for the industry sector. Being one of the key drivers of 4th and 5th Industrial revolutions (Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0), the adoption of XR has the potential to advance or even shift many traditional industrial operations to safe and sustainable technology-supported processes. This, in turn, leads to resource efficiency, overall optimization of industrial processes, and increased competitiveness, enforcing the desire to integrate xReality in the industrial context.

In the field of industrial maintenance, the application of XR technologies is commonly reviewed from two perspectives. Augmented reality, due to the possibility of visualising digital information in a context-sensitive manner, can aid the operations of workers in hazardous industrial contexts. This would increase their efficiency and occupational safety, positively affecting their well-being and performance. Virtual reality, which facilitates collaboration and realistic interactions with virtual objects in simulated environments, can be used to aid and enhance a large number of internal industrial operations related to product development and service design. This would help advance industrial collaboration and deeply integrate lean and agile methodologies, creating value creation and costs and other resources. Therefore, the application of AR and VR is expected to dramatically transform work operations in the field, leading to human-centricity and other positive impacts on organisational and individual levels.

However, the adoption of xReality has slowed down due to many factors, including, yet limited technological capabilities, human resistance to novel technologies, and the lack of unified design, development, and adoption practices. This dissertation aims to uncover hidden stones on the way to a smooth and responsible adoption of industrial XR to meet the requirements of Industry 4.0 and deliver maximum value to users and organisations. Based on action-based research in a tight academia-industry collaboration with KONE Corporation, a global elevator manufacturer and maintenance provider, this work provides generalisable knowledge on how to design and develop XR solutions, extracting insights from two case studies with domain experts. As an outcome, this work demonstrates the potential application scenarios of integrating XR in the context of industrial maintenance and suggests the design and adoption strategy, focusing on scalability and inclusion.