Operation-support system for transportable earth station using augmented reality

Abstract

We have developed a prototype system for supporting operation of a transportable earth station using augmented reality technology, and have had a preliminary experiment for investigating properties of the operation-support system. It was not easy for non-technical staffs to treat the equipments they saw for the first time. The operation-support system gives us information on how to manage the pieces of equipment, using a see-through HMD. The equipment is distinguished with a marker. The automatic voice also lets the user know the identified equipment, and the voice attention works to reduce a mistake of operation. To simplify authoring of multimedia data for the instruction, the Web browser in information presentation was adopted for using the existent resources. The result of the experiment suggested that the system improved reliability of information acquisition, obtaining information of what user sees. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.