A pilot study for Augmented Reality supported procedure guidance to operate payload racks on-board the International Space Station

We present our current state in developing and testing of Augmented Reality supported spaceflight procedures for intra-vehicular payload activities. Our vision is to support the ground team and the flight crew to author and operate easily AR guidelines without programming and AR knowledge. For visualization of the procedural instructions using an HMD, 3D registered visual aids are overlaid onto the payload model operated by additional voice control. Embedded informational resources (e.g., images and videos) are provided through a mobile tangible user interface. In a pilot study that was performed at the ESA European Astronaut Centre by application domain experts, we evaluated the performance, workload and acceptance by comparing our AR system with the conventional method of displaying PDF documents of the procedure.