An Advanced Authoring Tool for Augmented Reality Applications in Industry

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, and they do not provide advanced visual effects. 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. 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. Key words— Augmented Reality, Authoring Tools, Non-immersive Desktop, Kinect, Occlusion