A context-aware augmented reality assisted maintenance system

Augmented reality (AR) provides a seamless interface between the virtual and real worlds, and it has been applied to various domains, e.g., product design, manufacturing, maintenance and repair, etc. In these AR systems, 3D graphics or other contents can be registered in the real environment to provide information to the users. Context-awareness can improve the usability of such AR systems through adapting the information rendered to the contexts so that the provided information can be more useful to the users. However, many AR product maintenance systems lack an authoring system that requires little programming skills to create context-aware AR contents. In this paper, an authoring system, authoring for context-aware AR (ACAAR), which provides concepts and techniques to author AR contents for context-aware AR applications, is proposed. Using ACAAR, the users can add and arrange various contents spatially, e.g., texts, images and computer-aided design (CAD) models, and specify the logical relationships between the AR contents and the maintenance contexts. In addition, a user study has been conducted to demonstrate the usability of the proposed system.