Product manufacturing information management in interactive augmented technical drawings

This work presents a novel Augmented Realty (AR) application to superimpose interactive Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) onto paper technical drawings. We augment drawings with contextual data and use a novel tangible interface to access the data in a natural way. We present an optimized PMI data visualization algorithm for CAD models in order to avoid model and annotation cluttering.. Our algorithm ranks the model faces with technical annotations according to angle, distance, occlusion and area. The number of annotations visualized on 3D model is chosen following the cognitive perception theory to avoid information overload. We also extended the navigation metaphor adding the concept of tangible model navigation and flipping using the duplex drawing. As case studies we used annotated models from ASME standards. By using PC hardware and common paper drawings, this approach can be integrated at low-cost in existing industrial processes