ADAM: Automatic Development of Auxiliary Models. An Authoring Tool for Augmented Reality Technical Documentation

Over the decades, technical documentation has moved from paper to digital, until today in which operators, through Augmented Reality (AR), have the possibility to be helped in component location and recognition for different procedures. To support these activities, AR interfaces need to be developed with instructions provided through visual assets tailored to the information to convey. For localization tasks, auxiliary models, i.e., standard geometric shapes are the most suited. In this work, we propose ADAM (Automatic Development of Auxiliary Models): an authoring tool to support designers in generating various shapes of auxiliary models in the right dimensions and without modeling them in a CAD software. Thanks to this tool, the designer has a ready-to-use database of auxiliary models to choose from reusable in different AR technical documentations. In this way, ADAM allows to significantly reduce the time spent creating each auxiliary model from scratch. We validated our tool in a user study. A focus group of expert designers were asked to implement an AR interface, using auxiliary models for a localization task, with both ADAM Tool and the current authoring practice. The results confirmed that our tool outperforms the current authoring practice in terms of time performance and user experience.