High Resolution Binocular Video See-Through Display for Interactive Work Support - Development of System and Evaluation of Depth Perception and Peg-in-Hole Tasks

The purpose of this study is development of high-resolution video see-through display for interactive work support. The interactive work support is a technology that can present appropriate work instructions corresponding to situations to the worker. In order to realize the technology, we are developing a video see-through display that can present work instructions. The video see-through display is composed mainly of displays and cameras. First, an image of a work object is captured by the cameras. Then, work instructions are superimposed by computer graphics (CG) on the captured image. Then, the superimposed image is displayed to the worker. Thereby, the worker can perform a task requiring an advanced skill, even if she/he is not an expert. So far, we have tried applying the technology to actual manufacturing tasks, using a prototype display system, and have performed some experiments to present the work instruction to worker. In the process of applying this technology to such manufacturing tasks, several problems have been revealed. One of the problems is that it is difficult to apply the interactive work support system to detailed tasks, because the resolution of displayed image is not sufficiently high. If the image resolution is high enough, worker can recognize the position of work object more accurately. Then, the interactive work support system can be applied to detailed tasks. In order to achieve this, we developed a full high definition monocular video see-through display. However, in principle the monocular system still had a problem, the difficulty of displaying three-dimensional position of CG. To solve this problem, in this paper, a binocular video seethrough display is developed based on monocular display. At first, the structure of binocular display is considered, and then the prototype display is constructed. In addition, some experimental results using human operators are reported.