Augmented reality based contextual sosial media in industrial environment

Contextual social media is a concept where users can embed media files into physical objects and the environment. This facilitates sharing text, video and audio related to the physical object in question. We have studied how the concept could support sharing tacit knowledge between maintenance personnel in industrial contexts. In our Augmented Reality (AR) based implementation, target objects are recognized with a smart phone based on the object's visual appearance. The visual appearance is further associated with a unique hashtag. This makes it possible to attach social media messages to that particular object just by including the appropriate hashtag to that message. When a service technician views the maintenance target with a smart phone, he can automatically see the attached posts from colleagues globally, or add new posts, for that particular machine. The hashtag can also connect the messages more widely, e.g. to a certain type of machine. Initial user feedback has been very encouraging and maintenance professionals saw that contextual social media could network maintenance technicians in a natural way, and could even replace separate networking applications that have been challenging to adopt at work places.