Abstract:

The US Naval-shipyards are in critical need of cost-saving and time-saving technologies that can improve their vital function of maintaining fleet-readiness. Augmented-Reality/Virtual-Reality/Mixed-Reality (AR/VR/MR) (Extended-Reality (XR)) has the potential to transform the landscape of shipyard-operations via accelerated training in simulated environments, improved safety-practices at the dry-docks and efficient maintenance-procedures on the ships. However, there are several barriers to entry of these technologies: cost of hardware/software; cybersecurity and technological hurdles in secure environments. Current approaches in XR do not consider the fact that training and operations are interrelated processes, and knowledge gained needs to seamlessly flow between them. Furthermore, they do not support direct integration with learning-management-systems (LMSs). Another challenge is that XR devices become obsolete rapidly. Hence, it is imperative that XR technologies procured for shipyards have good return-on-investment, are scalable and device-agnostic.

In this paper, the research-team presents an immersive ecosystem that enables speedy content-generation and integration of maintenance and safety procedures with training. The approach employs modern open-source web-based AR/VR technologies to enable: conversion of contextual procedural-content from legacy documents such as standard-operating-procedures (SOPs) into secure XR format; live remote-assistance for performance-support, thereby avoiding travel and saving costs; capture of objective-quality-evidence (OQE) while performing safety-procedures, employing MR to augment live machine-readings in the physical view for inspectors, and enabling eLearning profiles such as cmi5 (https://xapi.com/cmi5/) to facilitate distributed learning architecture, employing LMSs, Learning-Record-Stores (LRSs), learner-record-standards such as eXperience-API (https://xapi.com/) and generating metrics that quantify student-performance to identify maintenance gaps. The approach will use a knowledge continuum - single-source-of-knowledge - between training and maintenance/performance-support, where information captured in one is channeled back into the other, resulting in improved quality-of-maintenance.

This paper documents the results from experiments that convert traditional Navy shipyard training-guides into XR format that can be rendered in various XR-enabled devices. The paper concludes with best-practices and lessons learned from these content-conversion-experiments.

Keywords: AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY (AR/VR);CONTENT GENERATION;ELEARNING;EXPERIENCE API;IMMERSIVE;ONLINE LEARNING;TRAINING;WEB-ENABLED;XAPI

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Deniz Ferrin