Transition of Mixed, Virtual, and Augmented Reality in Smart Production Environments - An Interdisciplinary View

The advancing desire of companies to provide their customers highly individualized products so as to gain sustainable advantages over their competitors has unavoidably deep effects on the production process. Although augmented and virtual reality is a quite common topic of research, in order to meet these demands, the analysis of the seamless transition of different reality-states like real reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality, and virtual reality within one and the same production task is an often neglected subject. In a broad and interdisciplinary approach we want to draw the attention of the research community on this, set the scene and explore the potential benefits and problems. Technical, epistemological, and philosophical as well as economic aspects are discussed. A prototype is presented as well as the results of a first explorative user test to prove the proposed concept