First- and Third-person Perspectives in the AR-assisted Blind Area Assembly

Abstract In the development of significant products, assembly efficiency is essential to the improvement of the output and quality of the equipment, and there is still a large amount of work that needs to be done manually by the user during the assembly process. Due to the complex internal structure of the product, the user’s hands, assembly parts, and internal construction are often invisible. The lack of visual information leads to low assembly efficiency, high error rates and user fatigue. In this study, we developed a video-assisted assembly guidance system, called ARScope, in the augmented reality (AR) environment. Users can freely place the mini camera module on the back of their hands or inside the narrow blind area and obtain the video from the firstperson perspective (FPP) and the third-person perspective (TPP). In AR, users can get a comfortable guiding experience by transforming, rotating and scaling the video screen. In addition, we designed and conducted the user study to investigate the effect of different viewpoints on assembly efficiency and user’s experience during video-assisted blind assembly in AR space, and also explored other influencing factors of this process. The results showed that FPP had more synergy with the user than TPP, resulting in an efficient assembly. In addition, the stability of the screen, the tactile feedback and the portability of the system hardware were also essential factors in the blind assembly process.