More applications of Augmented Reality (AR) in manufacturing industries are intro-duced every day and while recent research has shown that one of the more popular applications, high-volume assembly instructions, might not offer the best setting for this technology, many other applications exist that do. For assembly, remote guidance or training, rare assemblies, low takt time, and high-mix production, do still show promise. This paper introduces the role of the ¿Augmented Welder¿, a role utilizing AR technology for the programming of a welding robot. An Operator Assistant System (OAS) in the form of a custom application programmed in Unity and visualized with a pair of Hololens2, which is connected to an ABB robot through RobotStudio Suite. The robot is equipped with a welding gun dummy. Results of the OAS evaluation showed that while the subjects were generally positive towards the assistant system, several issues were identified and raised by various degrees of severity. The primary issues arose around the navigation and interaction with 2D menus and 3D objects in a 3D Mixed Reality (MR) space. The absence of physics confused the subjects as they could not interact with the virtual objects as they would have with physical objects. Further-more, the interaction with 2D menus in a 3D space was both reported and observed as being very difficult as the 2D representations probably led to problems with depth perception.
