An Augmented Reality System for the Construction Industry and Its Impact on Workers' Situational Awareness

Augmented reality (AR) technology assists construction workers by superimposing additional virtual information onto their real worksite environments. Ideally, this provides them with a better understanding of their tasks and hence boosts task performance. However, the additional information that AR places in users' field of view could limit their ability to understand what is going on in their surroundings and to predict how conditions may change in the near future. AR-assisted systems on construction sites could therefore expose their users to safety risks due to disturbance from the system. Hence, it is important to understand how AR-assisted systems can block users' understanding of their immediate environments, and in turn, how worksite safety in the construction industry could be improved through better design of such systems. This preliminary research conducted a laboratory experiment that simulated rebar inspection tasks and compared the situational awareness of AR users against that of subjects using traditional paper-based inspection methods, as measured by the Situation Awareness Rating Technique. Based on the results, we discuss the safety impact of head-mounted AR-assisted displays on situational awareness during construction tasks.