FaiMR

FaiMR, Furniture Assembly Instructor in Mixed Reality

Description

Printed instruction manuals for furniture assembly often have one disadvantage in common: it takes a lot of time
to make sense of their meaning since they show several steps of assembly together in a few pictures.
Furthermore, it is hard to find the connection between the instructions printed in 2D and the real parts.

The idea of this work is to connect the instruction directly to the parts of a piece of furniture. To do this,
mixed reality is used, which combines reality (grabbed by a webcam) with additional information using common
computer graphics in 2D and 3D which are overlayed. A prototype is being developed that allows the authoring
and storage of an instruction as well as the use of a stored instruction.
This prototype is called (Mixed Reality) Furniture Assembly Instructor (FaiMR). The FaiMR is based on
the AMIRE framework, which uses ARToolkit as a cheap and flexible solution for tracking. So called markers are
placed on the parts of a furniture. By tracking these markers via webcam, the application can distinguish between
different parts.

The aim of this thesis is to present the concepts on which the working prototype is based. Finally, some other
approaches to this topic are presented and compared to the concepts in this work.

Publications

Authoring of a Mixed Reality Assembly Instructor for Hierarchical Structures , Zauner J.,
Haller M., Brandl A., Hartmann W., In ISMAR 2003, The Second International Symposium
on Mixed and Augmented Reality, pp. 237-246, IEEE, Tokyo, October 2003.

Authoring of a Mixed Reality Furniture Assembly Instructor , Zauner J., Haller M.,
Brandl A., Hartmann W., In ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Conference Abstracts and Applications,
San Diego, CA, 2003.

Entwicklung einer interaktiven Möbelbauanleitung auf Mixed Reality Basis,
Brandl Alexander, Master Thesis, Upper Austria University for Applied Science,
Hagenberg, 2003 [in German].

Additional Data

In our FaiMR-system we can use either an HMD-setup, a Tablet PC or a Pocket PC (e.g. iPAQ). FaiMR is based on the
AMIRE-framework. The iPAQ-version (AMIRE-ES) has been implemented together with the IMS from the
Technical University of Vienna (Prof. Dieter Schmalstieg).