Mixed Reality Navigation on a Tablet Computer for Supporting Machine Maintenance in Wide-area Indoor Environment

This paper describes a maintenance service support system for wide-area indoor environment, such as a factory and a hospital. In maintenance services, operators often have to check a map to find out a way to a target machine, and also have to refer documents to get information about check-up and repair of the machine. In order to reduce working load of operators, information technology can help operators carry out additional but important operations during maintenance, such as referring documents and maps, recording maintenance logs and so on. In this paper, we propose mixed reality navigation on a tablet computer composed of augmented virtuality mode and augmented reality mode. Augmented virtuality mode performs map-based navigation shows positions of the user and the target machine. Augmented reality mode performs intuitive visualization of information about the machine by overlaying annotations on camera images. The proposed system is based on a hybrid localization technique realized with pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and 3D model-based image processing for the purpose of covering wide-area indoor environment. Experimental results using our prototype with a mock-up model of a machine are also described for showing feasibility of our concept in the paper.