Augmented reality projects in the automotive and aerospace industries

The 2003 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality was accompanied by a workshop on potential industrial applications. The organizers wisely called it potential because the real use of augmented reality (AR) in an industrial context is still in its infancy. Our own experience in this field clearly supports this viewpoint. We have been actively involved in the research, development, and deployment of AR systems in the automotive, aviation, and astronautics industries for more than five years and have developed and implemented AR systems in a wide variety of environments while working at DaimlerChrysler in Germany. In this article we have selected 10 AR projects from those we have managed and implemented in the past to examine the main challenges we faced and to share some of the lessons we learned.