Impact of augmented reality guidance for car repairs on novice users of AR: a field experiment on familiar and unfamiliar tasks

The use of augmented reality (AR) guidance is seen as an opportunity to address the growing complexity of industrial tasks. Previous research showed benefits of AR for different industrial tasks especially for novice users, while other research suggests that AR was not superior to other means for novices. However, there is not much work that looks at the relation between initial exposure of users to AR (that is, if users have never used AR before) and different types of tasks. In this industry paper, addressing the field of car maintenance and repair, we look into the question of how AR support impacts the performance in familiar and unfamiliar task if the AR user has never used AR before. By running an experiment under field conditions, we investigate whether the familiarity of a specific repair task has an impact on the performance under AR head-mounted display (AR HMD) guidance compared to a traditional repair guideline. Our experiment reveals interesting insights. First, we show that familiarity and routine have an important impact on adherence to (all) repair guidelines, which should be regarded in future studies. Second, despite its novelty and the corresponding added time to deal with an AR HMD, we found that guidance via an AR HMD worked better for unfamiliar tasks. This shows the potential of AR HMDs for guidance of industrial tasks in practice, and it brings up design suggestions for the implementation of this guidance in practice.