Tangible Interfaces for Augmented Engineering Data Management

To maintain a competitive edge in global market, manufacturing enterprises must leverage their digital information assets, which include a tremendous amount of engineering data: CAD models, FEM analysis, tolerances, annotations, etc.. An emerging technology called Digital Master embeds all the engineering knowledge about a product into its CAD model. Tools and process to efficiently manage, distribute, and modify this information are essential. The digital master, which virtually eliminates the stacks of technical drawings, is not yet completely adopted in industrial practice, mainly because engineering software do not support at best all phases of the virtual product development process. At present time, Engineering Data Management (EDM) tools use standard desktop-based GUI, which demonstrated the following limits: scarce usability for not CAD professionals, low cooperation level, limited management for different expertises and low integration between real and virtual models. As far as regards usability, current Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) in EDM are mainly based on part features tree view and spreadsheets operations. This GUI may not be user friendly to navigate and perceive complex CAD models or to be used in manufacturing environments. Moreover desktop GUI does not facilitate team working, because of the physical barrier of the computer screens (called “immediate individual environment”). Effective EDM tools should provide a better digital cooperative workspace similar to a meeting table and should improve communication among experts in different fields. Another issue to face in current EDM systems is the information overload. A new generation of software tools is needed to simplify the visualization and database access according to users’ roles and expertises. An additional drawback of current EDM software is the lack of a unique workspace where virtual models, technical drawings and physical products can coexist for discussion. This scenario is common in industry because a virtual shape (i.e. CAD model) often needs to be compared with physical mock-ups. According to the authors’ vision, the ideal collaborative drawing-less workspace for EDM could benefit from Augmented Reality (AR) technology (Fig. 1). Born in military and aerospace applications to augment information-dense environments with digital data, AR can provide an ideal solution for Digital Master exploration. In fact, Dunston demonstrated with engineering user tests, that the perception of 3D design can be improved using AR (Dunston et al., 2002).