Integrating Extended Reality (XR) in a Smart Factory Environment: Systematic Review

The main goal of this work is to study the integration of extended reality in the setting of Smart Factories. In order to investigate this topic a systematic review is conducted by performing bibliometric analysis followed by a cluster analysis. Bibliometric metadata as well as performance metrics for key search terms were collected with the use of Scopus and Web of Science databases. Then network analysis was conducted using VOSviewer and Citespace of the collected metadata. From the cluster analysis key works were identified and NVivo was used to perform a lexical analysis in order to perform a reappraisal and review of the topic at hand. Finally Zotero was used to create a bibliography. Through this work it was shown that Extended Reality and Smart factories have great academic interest independently, however the integration of extended reality within a smart factory environment is a relatively new and emerging topic with a great scope for new research. This partly due to the limited adoption of Smart Factories in the manufacturing industry globally as this industry is still transitioning into Industry 4.0. Following the discussion of analysis results future work derived from relevant NSF awarded grants has also been discussed.