An Immersive Service Guide for Home Appliances

Virtual reality is increasingly used in a wide range of applications due to the capabilities of immersive presentation and interaction with realistic 3D content. A broad and potentially prominent area of application of VR are multimedia service and operation guides for home appliances, addressed to both technicians and end-users. In comparison to traditional textual, audio and video guides, VR-based interactive guides can be more adaptable, precise, user-friendly and attractive, which are advantages to both producers and consumers. However, due to the difficulty associated with the creation of such guides, they still gain little attention of manufacturers and distributors of products. In this paper, we present an immersive service guide that illustrates scenarios of repairing and testing induction hobs. The service guide has been developed in the Unity game engine, and runs on smartphones with inexpensive headsets and gesture tracking devices. The guide has been elaborated in cooperation with Amica S.A., which is a major household appliance producer in Poland. The guide can be an important innovation in training of technical staff as well as end users, at the same time serving as a marketing tool, which can attract customers as well as technicians.