Is there a reality in Industrial Augmented Reality?

In the spirit of the seminal article by Brooks [12] that surveys the field of Virtual Reality to evaluate its level of applicability, we study the readiness of Industrial Augmented Reality (IAR). We have been hearing about IAR since Mizell and Caudell [14] first gave a name to AR, but how many applications broke out of the lab to be used by non-developers? In reviewing the literature, we note the amazing progress made in display technology, rendering and tracking. Given these improvements, one might expect AR-based industrial products to flourish. Unfortunately, this is still not the case. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of industrial AR applications. We organize the different applications of IAR over the life-cycle of products, in order to draw some parallels between the different proposed concepts and offer a clear taxonomy for future applications. We also propose and apply a rubric to evaluate existing IAR systems in order to highlight reasons for success and offer guidelines in the hope that it will help IAR become “really real”.