An Authoring Tool for Mixed Reality Interfaces for Digital Twins in Manufacturing

While the concept of digital twins has a history of at least twenty years, the design of user interfaces for digital twins is less well studied. Extended Reality (XR) interfaces show particular potential in this domain. Creating a custom XR interface for a digital twin requires the involvement of software engineers with diverse skill sets. Existing efforts to create XR interfaces for digital twins have been case studies designed for the specific use cases they were tested on. This paper introduces an authoring tool that allows end users without programming expertise to create XR interfaces for digital twins without writing any code themselves. Our initial prototype demonstrates the ability to parse machine data formatted according to the MTConnect standard, and provides menu-based interfaces and a sandbox of data visualizations to guide users through interpreting and displaying data.