One area in which glasses-based augmented reality (AR) is successfully applied in industry is order picking in logistics (pick-byvision). Here, the almost hands-free operation and the direct integration into the digital workflow provided by augmented reality glasses are direct advantages.
A common non-AR guidance technique for order picking is pickby-light. This is an efficient approach for single users and low numbers of alternative targets. AR glasses have the potential to overcome these limitations. However, making a grounded decision on the specific AR device and the particular guidance techniques to choose for a specific scenario is difficult, given the diversity of device characteristics and the lack of experience with smart glasses
in industry at larger scale.
The contributions of the paper are twofold. First, we present a virtual reality (VR) simulation approach to ground design decisions for AR-based solutions and apply it to the scenario of order picking. Second, we present results from a simulator study with implemented simulations for monocular and binocular head-mounted displays and compared existing techniques for attention guiding with our own SWave approach and the integration of eye tracking.
Our results show clear benefits for the use of pick-by-vision compared to pick-by-light. In addition to that, we can show that binocular AR solutions outperform monocular ones in the attention guiding task.