An Easy-to-Use AR Authoring Tool for Industrial Applications

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) applications have been emerged last years as a valuable tool for saving significant costs in maintenance and process control tasks in industry. This trend has been stimulated by the appearance of authoring tools that allow the fast and easy development of AR applications. However, most of current AR authoring tools are actually programming interfaces that are exclusively suitable for programmers, and they do not provide advanced visual effects such as occlusion or object collision detection.This paper proposes an easy-to-use AR authoring tool oriented to the development of AR applications for the execution of industrial sequential procedures. Unlike other recent easy-to-use AR authoring tools, this software framework allows non-programming users to develop both marker-based and markerless ARsolutions for different mobile hardware platforms, including occlusion capabilities. In order to validate the proposed AR authoring tool, we have developed four AR applications belonging to different industrial areas. The evaluation results show that overlaying 3D instructions on the actual work pieces reduces the error rate for an assembly task by more than a 75% particularly diminishing cumulative errors common in sequential procedures. Also, the results show that the time required by non-programming users to develop the AR prototypes using our tool was more than 90% lower than the time required for developing the same prototypes with computer graphics programmers. These results validate the tool as a general-purpose AR authoring tool for industrial AR applications.