Does augmented reality help in industrial training? A comprehensive evaluation based on natural human behavior and knowledge retention

The complexity and diversity of products significantly increases the difficulty of training workers in modern industries. AR training, as a combination of industrial digital development and new interactive means, has attracted increasingly more attention. However, in human factor and education, research regarding AR based training is still in its infancy. To understand how AR could help industrial training from a human perspective, we evaluate a HoloLens-based AR training method for an assembly task on natural human behavior and the training effectiveness. Forty-four participants were equally divided into AR and ordinary training groups with the equivalent instructional materials, which included text information and 3D models. Results show that although AR did not significantly affect the overall workload and system usability assessment (SUS) recorded, several experimental values increased significantly compared with the ordinary training method, including task completion time, time required to interpret text-based information, amount of attention switching, and training effectiveness. Consequently, the use of AR did not result in a completion time and workload reduction; however, we found that training with the AR system was more effective than ordinary training in increasing the knowledge retention of participants without increasing their overall workload, especially for the month-term memory. Nonetheless, a longer time was required by the users to familiarize themselves with the AR environment and read the text information. The findings of this work could contribute to the design of future AR training systems in industry considering natural human behavior and enhance training effectiveness.