Augmented reality for plant lifecycle management

Augmented reality is a technology expected to have a big impact as a natural and intuitive user interface to industrial applications. A lot of research has been done in industrial augmented reality but real life applications are still rare. One reason for the slow adoption seems to be that augmented reality applications have been developed without taking sufficiently into account the existing industrial processes in information management. This paper describes a prototype software which uses augmented reality as a user interface to plant lifecycle management applications in different lifecycle phases. Several use cases implemented show that augmented reality can be implemented cost efficiently without specific authoring tools if the design information is correctly structured already in the design phase, and if the design, maintenance and real-time information sources are accessed via standard application interfaces.