APPLICATION OF AUGMENTED REALITY IN MINING INDUSTRY

The article follows many years of experience of the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the Faculty of Mining and Geology of the VSB - TUO. In our paper we follow the trend of incorporating modern means of automation and visualization using augmented reality (AR hereafter) in the raw material industry processes. We deal with such applications when the coal miner himself or the machinery used are equipped with head-mount display or intelligent glasses which display information optimizing his performance and increasing safety. The article is primarily concerned with presenting information in a way that greatly supports decision-making processes, such as applications related to navigation in the mine environment, new teaching methods for work with mining equipment, display of real-time information to facilitate work, training in mine safety, prevention of mining accidents and other. When uncovering the potential of AR we conducted a series of experiments confirming the applicability of these technologies. For experiments with augmented and virtual reality we used the programming environment Metaio and Unity and for visualization of devices the Oculus Rift development kit.