Augmented Reality for Product Validation: Supporting the Configuration of AR-Based Validation Environments

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of early and continuous validation activities as a means of addressing customer requirements in product development in a better way. At the same time, early validation activities come with additional challenges resulting from a high degree of uncertainty and a lack of resources at this stage. The use of Augmented Reality technology offers a promising approach for addressing these challenges and allows different product variants to be experienced early in the development process, thus generating meaningful customer feedback. However, in many cases, the use of AR technology in product development practice is not target-oriented as it lacks methodological support. Building on this observation, this paper presents a method for supporting the configuration of AR-based validation environments as one of the central preparatory activities for product validation using AR technology. It also introduces a descriptive model for AR-based validation environments laying the theoretical foundations for the method.