Manufacturing Change: The Impact of Virtual Environments on Real Organizations

Manufacturing workplaces are becoming sites of intense change as technologies like IoT and AR/VR are beginning to make deep inroads into how complex products are engi-neered and assembled. These categories of technologies are becoming prominent in manufacturing because they offer potential solutions to the problems of unskilled labor and workforce shortages. Technology has the potential to shift manufacturing in both large and small ways, to better un-derstand how a manufacturing organization might appropri-ate VR, we ran a study with a global aviation manufacturer headquartered the United States. To document the changing nature of work via this class of technologies we conducted a VR study which facilitated access to participant observation and interviews (n=21). Our findings provide initial insights into the organizational impact of VR on human perfor-mance augmentation and skill acquisition revealing the larger infrastructural challenges facing the adoption of con-sumer grade smart technologies in industrial workplace settings.