Designing User-Guidance for eXtendend Reality Interfaces in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Modern industrial environments evolve from collections of physical machines into networked extended reality environments, where in addition to the physical machines digital content becomes increasingly significant. Examples of such digital content include not only the necessary information to control the production, but also digital instructions and product information, information derived from embedded sensors or predictive models, as wells as digital twins of products, machines and entire factories. This means that user interface designers in such environments have to design interfaces that allow access to and interaction with both the virtual and physical aspects. The design of user interfaces for such eXtendend Reality (XR) environments faces a number of challenges including the change of the implementation platform from a “standardized” PC GUI to I/O devices and paradigms that are suitable for XR. Examples include mobile and wearable devices as well as virtual and augmented reality. There is still a lack of standards and best-practices regarding the design of XR interfaces, especially when interaction and data visualization techniques are required to support work across different platforms. This chapter focuses on guidance techniques that help users navigate the complex information and interaction tasks in XR environments, as this is an area for which little information is currently available. The chapter explains why different forms of user guidance are required in XR environments, why these pose a challenge for user interface designers, and presents techniques that can be used to aid the design process.