Remote support for maintenance tasks by the use of Augmented Reality: the ManuVAR project

This paper presents an application tool developed to support effective maintenance in the railway sector. Considering that this is a sector where maintenance is especially critical, due to factors such as urgency in corrective maintenance operations, integration of hundred of subsystems and integration of different sources of information, this makes it suitable for an augmented reality based system. The use of augmented reality eases the integration and useful visualization of data meant to help the on-site worker to perform the operations; in a different business case, augmented reality enhances the communication between a remote expert and an on-site worker, allowing better information exchange between both actors.