Liteye supplies HMD for pilot program aboard the International Space Station
WEAR++ is an ESA/ESTEC project that aims at developing a powerful, lightweight, modular and easily wearable Augmented Reality (AR) system that allows hands free operation using speech recognition and synthesis, imagebased location and orientation tracking, and barcode reading. This technology is applicable to domains as diverse as architecture and construction engineering or crew-operations support onboard the International Space Station (ISS).
As computer systems become lighter and more powerful, it is expected that wearable devices will become commonplace. These devices bring software tools closer to the user and integrate seamlessly in the workflow of manual activities. Wearable systems can assist and increase the efficiency of the user in complex, human-intensive tasks. The WEAR++ project has produced a space-qualified demonstrator of such system to support payload and maintenance procedures onboard the ISS. The prototype has passed all the acceptance tests and it is ready to be flown to the ISS in Space Shuttle mission STS-128. Onboard the station, WEAR++ will be used to assist an astronaut during a representative maintenance procedure in the Columbus laboratory. This exercise will provide valuable knowledge on the usability and the usefulness of different technologies:
• Wearable devices for procedure execution support
• Augmented reality to assist crew operations in space
• Combination of vision-based and inertial techniques for indoors localization and orientation tracking
• Speech recognition and synthesis in the ISS environment
• Interfacing with the ISS inventory database from a mobile device