Challenges, opportunities and future trends of emerging techniques for Augmented Reality-based maintenance

Augmented reality (AR) is a well-known technology that can be exploited to provide mass-market users an effective and customizable support in a large spectrum of personal applications, by overlapping computer-generated hints to the real world. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are playing a key role in the exponential growth of this kind of solutions. Nonetheless, there exists some application domains that just started to take advantage from the AR systems. Maintenance, repair, and assembly have been considered as strategic fields for the application of the AR technology from the 1990s, but often only specialists using ad hoc hardware were involved in limited experimental tests. Nowadays, AR-based maintenance and repair procedures are available also for end-users on consumer electronics devices. This paper aims to explore new challenges and opportunities of this technology, by also presenting the software framework that is being developed in the EASE-R3 project by exploiting reconfigurable AR procedures and tele-assistance to overcome some of the limitations of current solutions.