The Virtual Factory: Hologram-Enabled Control and Monitoring of Industrial IoT Devices

Augmented reality (AR) has been exploited in manifold fields but is yet to be used at its full potential. With the massive diffusion of smart devices, opportunities to build immersive human-computer interfaces are continually expanding. In this study, we conceptualize a virtual factory: an interactive, dynamic, holographic abstraction of the physical machines deployed in a factory. Through our prototype implementation, we conducted a user-study driven evaluation of holographic interfaces compared to traditional interfaces, highlighting its pros and cons. Our study shows that the majority of the participants found holographic manipulation more attractive and natural to interact with. However, current performance characteristics of head-mounted displays must be improved to be applied in production.