Remote Handling within the Active Cells Facility at the European Spallation Source, Using Digital Reality Techniques

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis was to investigate the possibilities of using Digital Reality (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) techniques in the remote handling within the Active Cells Facility at the European Spallation Source. The remote handling within similar environments as the Active Cells Facility has normally been performed using radiation shielding windows. As the operations get more complex, and both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies get cheaper, more advanced, more robust, and easier to use, there is a growing interest in trying to apply these technologies for better control and monitoring within these environments. This thesis will try to answer the question of what requirements on hardware and software these kinds of solutions would have, and which designs would be most promising as these technologies get better. Different ideas were explored by researching existing documentation and exploring existing solutions and products. Experiments on these ideas were conducted on different products that were commercially available at the time. Different solutions were tried using these products and were then evaluated using both informal and formal user tests. The final prototype was tested on 14 volunteers at the European Spallation Source. The results from these tests indicated that the application of Digital Reality techniques to the remote handling within the Active Cells Facility could indeed prove to be very useful. It could improve the visualization of the operations inside, and increase the confidence among operators. The Digital Reality technologies are rapidly improving and the products could be powerful enough for this kind of application within a few years. It is important to note that Digital Reality is not necessarily useful in and of itself. It is important to identify the tasks to be performed and the difficulties in performing these, but also the capability and limitations of the hardware at hand. Once these have been identified, it is easy to create an appropriate Digital Reality environment with complementing non-Digital Reality technology for efficiently performing the tasks.