Using the HoloLens2 to Assist Future Astronauts Cultivate Plants: A Study on User Experience in Augmented Reality

Kurzfassung

Space agencies worldwide are setting out for human space exploration inthe following decades. Manned missions will be launched towards the moonin 2025 and by 2040, humanity wants to establish transport routes to Mars.With these plans in mind, a demand for crop cultivation aboard space stations has arisen: Crops that can be grown on-site do not need to be transported through space, and they improve wellbeing of crew members.The German Aerospace Institute (DLR) has previously explored crop cultivation in extremely isolated environments in a test site with environmentalconditions analogous to outer space; a mobile test facility near the researchstation Neumayer III in Antarctica. The experiments yielded edible food,but an evaluation of crew work loads and working times found that operators on-site have to spend high amounts of time on maintenance and repairscompared to remote support crew members. Because crew time is valuable,the goal of future projects is to reduce these work loads.To aid future astronauts in crop cultivation, a field that they usually donot specialize in, new interfaces with augmented reality are being developedfor applications aboard space stations. This thesis explores previous applications of augmented reality in space and continues on previous work onhardware selection and the ARCHIE2 concept. ARCHIE2 is a software andinterfacing concept that is designed to provide assistance for common tasks inextraterrestial greenhouses, and presents a prototype that shows informationabout sensors and maintenance procedures in augmented reality.The prototype was evaluated in a user study which compares operatorwork load and task execution time to the old approach of using printedinstructions. Findings from this user study provide an insight into how newusers adapt to augmented reality and how existing designs can be improvedand extended for future work.