Manufacturing and construction industries, including shipbuilding, are developing various digital solutions to increase efficiency in their processes, and digitalisation requires new kinds of capabilities from workers at all levels. Research on the use of augmented reality (AR) in various industries suggests that AR systems could be incorporated into training on digitalisation and Industry 4.0 solutions also in the shipbuilding industry to improve worker performance and productivity. This literature review of 29 publications synthesises the AR studies in the shipbuilding industry, with an attempt to identify goals, AR tools, and development needs in applying AR for training in shipbuilding. The analysis takes into account recently developed AR applications, the software and hardware components used for application development, the scope of developed AR apps, the utilised AR types, and the target audience of these applications by discussing their implementation. The investigation of AR tools in the shipbuilding industry reveals that the developed applications target work-related processes and tasks. Organisations do not usually consider the readiness level of their employees to adopt AR systems by organising in-service training programs. Additionally, this study found no formal training programs or learning resources that integrated AR to enhance learning. Only two out of 29 papers pursued the goal of teaching. This paper also represents co-occurrence maps of the most used hardware and software components of AR development in the shipbuilding industry and the preferred keywords of the reviewed publications. According to this review, the shipbuilding industry typically favours AR for work implementations like visualising designs, detecting the location of vessels, and providing instructions or manuals to use devices in the field rather than training employees. Furthermore, despite the existence of cutting-edge HMD-based innovative AR platforms, these developed applications usually select and use handheld devices as delivery tools due to their accessibility. The determined lack of AR materials for teaching purposes also inspired this research to recommend and represent a new AR application for teaching purposes to fill the gap of a lack of AR teaching instruments in the shipbuilding industry by using the most used hardware and software components of the analysis, such as Unity and handheld devices.

Keywords: Augmented reality, shipbuilding, digitalisation, teaching, material development.