The need to be economically successful is the key driver for companies to be innovative and implement new technologies with increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Uncertainty about whether to use new technologies and missing knowledge about their advantages lead to staggering and withholding from fast diffusion of innovations. Focusing on the industry of logistics and the technology Mixed Reality, this research project developed a methodical approach for evaluating the fitness of an innovative technology and a specific process of application. A mixed methods approach was derived, based on interviews and experiments. The main methodologies used, were semi-structured interviews with decision makers in logistics companies to elaborate triggering criteria in the investment process and laboratory experiments for the evaluation of competing technologies. These methods were framed by an initial field experiment and feedback interviews after the analysis for the validation of the approach. The research proved the competitively viable applicability of Mixed Reality and its specific strengths and weaknesses in manual order picking. This set the foundation for possible further development and implementation of the technology. The developed methodological approach proved to be a valid and reliable assessment of the intersection between a technology and specified process of application. This can greatly enhance the speed of implementing new innovations and gaining competitive advantages for companies.

This thesis addresses the subject of converging real and virtual environments to a combined entity that can facilitate physiologically complying interfaces for the purpose of training. Based on the mobility and physiological demands of dismounted soldiers, the base assumption is that greater immersion means better learning and potentially higher training transfer. As the user can interface with the system in a natural way, more focus and energy can be used for training rather than for control itself. Identified requirements on a simulator relating to physical and psychological user aspects are support for unobtrusive and wireless use, high field of view, high performance tracking, use of authentic tools, ability to see other trainees, unrestricted movement and physical feedback. Using only commercially available systems would be prohibitively expensive whilst not providing a solution that would be fully optimized for the target group for this simulator. For this reason, most of the systems that compose the simulator are custom made to facilitate physiological human aspects as well as to bring down costs. With the use of chroma keying, a cylindrical simulator room and parallax corrected high field of view video see-though head mounted displays, the real and virtual reality are mixed. This facilitates use of real tool as well as layering and manipulation of real and virtual objects. Furthermore, a novel omnidirectional floor and thereto interface scheme is developed to allow limitless physical walking to be used for virtual translation. A physically confined real space is thereby transformed into an infinite converged environment. The omnidirectional floor regulation algorithm can also provide physical feedback through adjustment of the velocity in order to synchronize virtual obstacles with the surrounding simulator walls. As an alternative simulator target use, an omnidirectional robotic platform has been developed that can match the user movements. This can be utilized to increase situation awareness in telepresence applications.

Dieser Beitrag stellt die Mixed-Reality-in-the-Loop Simulation (MRiLS) zur Schulung technischer Fachkräfte im Maschinen- und Anlagenbau vor. Die MRiLS koppelt die aus dem Engineering bereits vorhandenen Modelle der Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation (HiLS) mit Visualisierungs- und Interaktionsmethoden der Mixed Reality (MR) und integriert dadurch den Nutzenden und dessen Verhalten sowie die reale Umgebung vollständig in den Simulationskreislauf. Der Beitrag thematisiert neben der notwendigen Middleware zur Kopplung der HiLS mit der MR-Umgebung auch die Steuerungsbelastung durch Multiuser-Zugriffe. Die Funktionsfähigkeit des vorgestellten Konzepts wird anhand eines ausgewählten beispielhaften Automatisierungssystems belegt. Für das Automatisierungssystem wird der Aufbau der MRiLS sowie das Konzept für den Ablauf einer Schulung mittels MRiLS vorgestellt.