Order picking is the process of finding and picking orders inside a warehouse. For more than 750,000 warehouses around the world, optimizing the order picking process increases efficiency for over one trillion dollars worth of goods that are fulfilled every year. In addition, order picking is a representative alternating task to assess HWD designs in which users need to alternate attention between a virtual heads-up interface while interacting with objects in the real world.
Towards Finding the Optimum Position in the Visual Field for a Head Worn Display Used for Alternating Tasks We used the Magic Leap One, a binocular head worn display, to investigate four different positions in the visual field for a virtual picking display: center-center (in line of sight), center-right, bottom-center, and botttom-right. The goal of the study is to determine the most efficient order picking display position in an environment that requires walking to travel between the pick shelves.
Comparing Order Picking Guidance with Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap, Google Glass XE and Paper We compare three significantly different HWDs and their idiosyncratic designs: Magic Leap One, Microsoft Hololens, and Google Glass Explorer Edition against paper pick lists (the industry standard).
References
2021
Towards finding the optimum position in the visual field for a head worn display used for task guidance with non-registered graphics
Georgianna Lin, Malcolm Haynes, Sarthak Srinivas, and 2 more authors
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2021
Where should a HWD be placed in a user’s visual field? We present two studies that compare comfort, preference, task efficiency and accuracy for various HWD positions. The first study offsets a 9.2° horizontal field-of-view (FOV) display temporally (toward the ear) from 0° to 30° in 10° steps. 30° proves too uncomfortable while 10° is the most preferred position for a simple button-pushing game, corroborating results from previous single-task reading experiments. The second experiment uses a Magic Leap One to compare 10° x 10° FOV interfaces centered at line-of-sight, temporally offset 15° (center-right), inferiorly offset 15° (bottom-center), and offset in both directions (bottom-right) for an order picking task. The bottom-right position proved worst in terms of accuracy and several subjective metrics when compared to the line-of-sight position.
Comparing order picking guidance with Microsoft hololens, magic leap, google glass xe and paper
Georgianna Lin, Tanmoy Panigrahi, Jon Womack, and 3 more authors
In Proceedings of the 22nd international workshop on mobile computing systems and applications, 2021
Head-worn displays (HWDs) are an efficient and cost-effective means to guide users in order picking, a task that requires users to alternate their attention between the physical environment and the HWD’s virtual image. After training 12 participants to expertise in picking, we compare three significantly different HWDs: Magic Leap One, Microsoft Hololens, and Google Glass Explorer Edition against paper pick lists (the industry standard). We find that previous findings on HWD benefits during such tasks are not reflected in all HWDs, suggesting that hardware design significantly influences efficacy. Based on experimental results and observations, we highlight challenges such as head weight, mounting, display clarity, field of view (FOV), and display position and discuss their possible effects on user comfort, user preference, task speed, and task accuracy.
