Augmenting Industrial Control Rooms with Multimodal Collaborative Interaction Techniques

The German manufacturing industry has been carrying out new developments towards the next industrial revolution, focusing on smart manufacturing environments. Our work emphasizes human-centered control rooms in the context of production plants. Increased automation does not have to come with less human control. Therefore, we report on multimodal collaborative interaction techniques to augment industrial control rooms. In particular, we include mobile workers who use the control room while being in the production hall using tablets or specifically mixed reality glasses. Collaborative annotation dashboards support discussions and a shared understanding among analysts. Manufacturing-related data can be integrated into business analytics environments so that holistic analyses can be performed. Multimodal interaction techniques can support effective interaction with the control room based on the users’ preferences. Immersive experience through mixed reality-based three-dimensional visualizations and interaction possibilities support users in obtaining a clear understanding of the underlying data