Abstract

Augmented reality is a key technology that is going to leave it's mark on the world in the next decade. Since it's inception in the 19th century and it's growth in popularity in the last decade, the technology has provided new use cases in the latest industrial revolution as well, creating the term industrial augmented reality.

Some of the main hurdles for the growth of this sector are scalability and lack of supporting tools for faster development and content creation. Although the technology is advancing, supporting authoring tools still have a long way to go.

In this master's thesis, the goal is to conduct a broad search to find the best practices for constructing industrial authoring tools for augmented reality, and then implement the findings into a creation of a new authoring tool, fit for industrial needs. The thesis will be supported by the industrial AR solutions company RE'FLEKT, and the development of the application will be influenced and evaluated by different departments of the company. The final aim will be to integrate this authoring tool to the RE'FLEKT ONE production pipeline in the future, which is their biggest product.

Implementation/Project Description

The project consists of two steps: The first step is an extensive research to shape the authoring tool. Here, a thorough research over industrial augmented reality, previous research on AR authoring, key points of AR interactions and contemporary authoring solutions are investigated.

The second step is to use this gathered data, merge it with RE'FLEKT's AR authors own wishes and recommendations and come up with an authoring solution which demonstrates a basic editor functionality combined with a bundle of elements which should make authoring in AR much easier. The tool is designed to be used with the current RE'FLEKT ONE authoring pipeline. The input elements for the tool are X3D object files, background pictures and "Augmented Photos", a concept patented by RE'FLEKT. Augmented Photos is basically photos of the tracked object, combined with an overlaid interactive AR content.

The first step is to create an application which can provide basic editor functionality. For this matter, several assets are used and connected with each other. On top of this, several AR features are implemented into the scene. These are preset backgrounds, bounds visualization, handheld and HMD emulations and Augmented Photos support.

The integration of X3D files and step-by-step instructions, the standards in RE'FLEKT ONE, are also included in the project.

Results

The application was tested with 7 people from UX (User Experience) and R&D (Research and Development) departments of RE'FLEKT, who already had an understanding of RE'FLEKT ONE pipeline and the authoring process. This was limited for the increased feedback quality. The survey was conducted in one-on-one online sessions, due to the coronavirus situation. The participant was sent the demo files prior to the session. The user used the tool in real time, meanwhile I was guiding them through different features through screen sharing methods. At the end of the session, each participant filled out a questionnaire designed using the Likert scale, which is a psychometric scale commonly involved in research that employs questionnaires. It consisted of three questions, the first one for authoring tool features, the next one for application's general rating and the last one for feedback. Below, you can find the results of the first two questions.

Conclusion

There were two main goals of this thesis: Doing adequate research for the best practices for using augmented reality in industrial authoring scenarios and using this information for the development of an authoring tool for RE'FLEKT.

I can surely say that both of these goals are achieved to some extent. The research spans the definition of industrial augmented reality and it's use cases, designs and algorithms used for industrial solutions as well as currently utilized authoring applications and plugins used worldwide. It also investigates the proven methodologies for augmented reality based human computer interactions. The research, also backed by internal brainstorming sessions, gathers the information necessary to create an authoring tool best suited to the company's needs.

The creation of the authoring tool is based on different assets, both internal and external, connected together to shape an interactive editor which is designed to fit the ONE pipeline. On top of that, AR features aimed for covering the shortcomings of the existing authoring tool are added into the product as well. After an user survey done with the experts in the company, this tool has seen the green light to continue development and possibly be shifted into a major program in the pipeline, proving satisfactory usability and proficiency to the authors of RE'FLEKT and it's customers.

Thesis PDF

Final Presentation