Asynchronous industrial collaboration: How virtual reality and virtual tools aid the process of maintenance method development and documentation creation

In the light of Industry 4.0, the field of Industrial Maintenance faces a large digital transformation, adopting Extended Reality (XR) technologies to aid industrial operations. For the manufacturing corporations that provide maintenance services, the efficiency of industrial maintenance plays a crucial role in the competitiveness and is tightly related to the technical documentation supporting maintenance. However, the process of documentation creation faces several challenges due to lack of access to the physical equipment and difficulties in remote communication between globally distributed departments. To address these shortcomings, this research investigates the utilization of Virtual Reality (VR) to facilitate asynchronous collaboration of globally dispersed departments involved in the pipeline of maintenance method and documentation creation. The presented proof-of-concept (the COVE-VR platform) has been developed as an academia-industry collaboration and evaluated iteratively with subject matter experts. The proposed VR platform consists of two virtual environments and eight virtual tools, which allow interaction with virtual prototypes (3D CAD models) and means of digital content creation. Our findings show the high relevance of the developed solution for the needs of industrial departments and the ability to support asynchronous collaboration among them. This article delivers qualitative findings on the value of VR technology and presents guidelines on how to develop virtual tools for digital content creation within VR, adaptable to other industrial contexts. We suggest providing embedded guidance and design consistency to ensure smooth interactions with virtual tools and further discuss the importance of proper positioning, the transparency of operations and the information property of generated content.