From Therbligs to Visual Assets: A Technique to Convey Work Instructions in Augmented Reality Technical Documentation

In this work, we present a technique to simplify the authoring of Augmented Reality Technical Documentation, allowing technical writers with limited knowledge in Augmented Reality (AR) to produce this new type of documentation in their companies. Contrarily to Traditional Technical Documentation, AR offers the opportunity to provide the exact amount of information needed through a careful design of the AR interface. However, in the literature, there are no established techniques to break work instructions down into elemental pieces of information and define how to convey this information through visual assets in AR. In this work, we proposed identifying the information contained in work instructions of technical documentation, extending the method of “Therbligs,” already used in the literature to describe assembly tasks. First, we defined six classes of information types: identity, location, order, way-to, notification, and orientation. Then, we showed how to use these information types to break down the work instructions of an assembly manual used as a case study. We found that the six information types were enough to analyze the complete manual. The second contribution of this work is the proposal of the most suitable visual asset and its properties for each information type. This goal was accomplished through a technical discussion in a focus group with ten experts in the design of AR technical documentation.