AR-Bicycle: Smart AR Component Recognition to Support Bicycle’s Second Life

The mass-product industry sees in the disposable object a solution able to provide a low-cost answer to the growing needs of consumers, feeding a consumerist circuit with negative social and environmental impact. The extension of this concept over a long time leads to the use of products composed by not durable components until they break down, then to the immediate replacement of the whole creation. Do-it-yourself, meant the ability to fix derivatives, counteracts this trend by extending the life cycle of objects, positively affecting both the environment and self-esteem. Advanced visualization technologies, such as augmented reality, can accompany and facilitate this process. Indeed, they provide tools accessible to all, thanks to smartphones, contextualizing digital info in the natural environment and expanding knowledge about the product's accommodation. This process's criticality is related to creating a 3D representation of the product to recognize the different components and associating multimedia data. The article's research aims to experiment with an Augmented Reality application to improve maintenance and repair activities anywhere and anytime on design products. The application is created and tested on the bicycle, a rapidly growing product even in large Italian cities. The purpose is to experiment with using Augmented Reality in the Industrial Product domain for fixing purposes, scaling its application to different types of products belonging to homogeneous classes.