Authors:
Jesús Gimeno
;
Pedro Morillo
;
Juan Manuel Orduña
and
Marcos Fernández
Affiliation:
Universidad de Valencia, Spain
Keyword(s):
Augmented Reality, Authoring Tools, Non-immersive Desktop, Kinect, Occlusion.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Environments
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Evaluation of Human Performance and Usability in Virtual Environments
;
Graphical Interfaces
;
Interactive 3D Graphics for Mobile Devices Like Smartphones, PDAs and UMPCs
;
Interactive Environments
Abstract:
The use of authoring tools has become a valuable trend for the fast development of Augmented Reality (AR) applications in industrial organizations. However, most of current AR authoring tools are actually programming interfaces that are exclusively suitable for programmers. Moreover, they do not provide advanced visual effects, such as occlusion or object collision detection, to the resulting AR applications. In this paper, we propose 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 low-cost AR applications, including occlusion capabilities, by means of the use of a Kinect sensor. These applications could be used in on-site assembly and maintenance/repair tasks where a certain level of depth perception is needed. In order to validate our AR authoring tool, we have developed four AR app
lications 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 show the potential of our approach and validate the tool as a general-purpose AR authoring tool for industrial AR applications.
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