Pick-by-vision: There is something to pick at the end of the augmented tunnel

We report on the long process of exploring, evaluating and refining augmented reality-based methods to support the order picking process of logistics applications. Order picking means that workers have to pick items out of numbered boxes in a warehouse, according to a work order. To support those workers, we have evaluated different HMD-based visualizations in six user studies, starting in a laboratory setup and continuing later in an industrial environment. This was a challenging task, as we had to conquer different kinds of navigation problems from very coarse to very fine granularity and accuracy. The resulting setup consists of a combined and adaptive visualization to precisely and efficiently guide the user even if the actual picking target is not always in the field of view of the HMD.