Virtual Assembly Companion: Investigating Multimedia-Instruction Provision in Assembly

Modern industrial assembly poses high productivity demands, which has lead to the adoption of instructional systems. Although instructional systems such as augmented reality or screen-based systems have shown to reduce mental effort and errors, they are typically evaluated against paper-based instructions, and the effects of instructional modality remains under-researched. This paper investigated three different instructional modalities, including text, audio, and a virtual avatar. We performed a withing-subject study with 36 participants and tested for the effect of instruction provision, and the preferences for a particular modality, on the efficiency and subjective experience in assembly systems. While the effect of instructional modalities wasn’t significant, our findings show a significant interaction effect between the modality and the user preference. Notably, descriptive statistics indicate that audio instructions resulted in the fastest task completion time in users that prefer audio modality. These results underscore the potential of multimedia-instructional systems for industrial environments, demonstrating that offering multimodal interfaces could improve productivity.