The broader impact/ potential benefit of this Convergence Accelerator Phase I project will be immediately applicable to the manufacturing sector, which has a multiplier effect on the economy and jobs. Automation is splitting the American labor force into two worlds: a relatively small number of highly educated professionals earning good wages, and less-educated workers who are left with businesses that pay low wages. Although we have had technology breakthroughs, the overall productivity growth is slow partly due to a workforce that lacks critical new competencies, such as procedural instruction learning, digital fluency, and other essential skills. The current and future workforce needs to be geared up for a culture of constant change. Companies have been relying on the age-old way of one-on-one Worker Apprenticeship model to train their new workforce. However, the recent need for larger scale and rapid training has created a bottleneck in terms of time and cost, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This research team of mechanical and electrical engineers, psychologists, computer scientists, and education researchers worked towards accomplishing a goal of creating a scalable low-cost solution for (re)skilling the workforce. We partnered with various manufacturing companies to both understand their challenges and also get active feedback regarding our prototypes.

Cost, time, and expertise to create augmented and virtual reality (AR-VR) is a barrier to wide deployment. By overlaying digital content over the physical world we addressed issues of worker training that SMEs continue to face. In order to address this (re)skilling challenge, we interviewed a large number of future users and determined the technology bottlenecks that had to be addressed. We developed methodologies to create a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) application platform for end users to create AR and VR products themselves. We then developed many minimum viable prototypes to emulate the worker apprenticeship and develop a new low-cost and flexible way for SMEs themselves to author in Augmented Reality (AR). We broke down the problem of worker (re)skilling into three categories: Authoring: knowledge transfer, Training-Learning: system scaling for consumption, and Feedback: providing active feedback to users. AR has shown to be a reliable mode of instructional training, improving speed and reliability, minimizing errors, and reducing the cognitive load of the user, especially for spatially situated instructions. SMEs are often unaware, reluctant, and lack access because of the high overhead costs, unknown returns, and lack of expertise involved in designing, creating, and maintaining the AR content for the success of this technology. Our proposed technologies which enable experts in the SMEs to create content on their own and provide a smooth transfer of knowledge. The ease of creation of AR, and elimination of dependency on programming experts translates to a reduction in AR development time and cost.

Last Modified: 09/29/2021
Modified by: Karthik Ramani