Comprehending products with mixed reality

Abstract

Nowadays, the virtual reality (VR) market has made significant strides. VR is widely used in different applications, and education and training are one of the leading areas which are expected to grow to US $2.2 billion in revenue by 2023. Mixed reality (MR) is also known as hybrid reality that encompasses both VR and augmented reality. It allows interaction and feedback from the users, which is particularly important to enhance the experience in teaching and learning. MR not only merges the real and virtual worlds into a new environment, which combines physical and digital content, but also allows users to interact with the digital content dynamically in real time. In support of teaching and training, MR technology has been applied in diverse manufacturing and industrial sectors to visualize the digital models. Nevertheless, most of these MR projects are mainly focused on users' experience. The effectiveness in comprehending product design is seldom investigated. Therefore, in this project, an MR application is developed for teaching product design to university students. The application is developed on the HoloLens system. A practicable application has been designed that allows students to visualize the geometry of 3-D objects as well as the exploded diagrams of selected components. The students can command the system through the command manual or can signal the system through gazing, gesturing, and voice to implement instructions. To investigate the effectiveness of the MR application in teaching product design, a pretest and a posttest of similar difficulties were designed to access students' abilities in five main areas: the ability of students in comprehending design, understanding product functions, visualizing 3-D geometry, understanding geometric relationship, and students' creativity. In the investigation, 45 students were participated in the tests. Experimental results show that the proposed design positively improves students' understanding in geometric relationships and creativity. In the future, more features will be added to the MR application to further improve students' abilities in learning and training in other aspects.

Identifying the Optimal 3D Display Technology for Hands-On Virtual Experiential Learning: A Comparison Study

“…The students can command the system through the command manual. Results show that the AR application positively improves students' understanding in geometric relationships and creativity [28].…”

“…Unlike mobile AR, AR HMD are not designed to isolate its user from the surrounding reality, but to superpose synthetic information on a transparent glass, such as Microsoft's Hololens [27]. In a recent study, to investigate the effectiveness of the AR application in teaching Geometric relationships, a practicable application was developed on the HoloLens system [28]. It allows students to visualize the geometry of 3-D objects as well as the exploded diagrams of selected components.…”

A Systematic Review of Product Design for Space Instrument Innovation, Reliability, and Manufacturing

“…This is because the space instrument usually consists of numerous factors such as size, weight, cost, extreme space environmental conditions, as well as a large number of components, high reliability, and stability, etc. With the recent advancement of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality [6], and blockchain, it is important to extensively explore the product innovation, design, and reliability issues and CSFs in order to develop an optimal solution of smart manufacturing for space instrument. The main aim of the study is to explore how innovation and product design is essential in the development of space instruments and manufacturing.…”

3D Modeling and Computer Graphics in Virtual Reality

“…The techniques not only apply to the development of virtual models for computer simulation, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), etc., but also it can be applied to many various application such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, etc. [4]. Despite VR technologies have been developed for many years, the development of computer hardware and the 5th generation (5G) mobile network bloomed the 5Vs of the data flow including volume, velocity, value, veracity and variety [5].…”