A New Flexible Augmented Reality Platform for Development of Maintenance and Educational Applications
Héctor P. Martínez, Seppo Laukkanen, Jouni Mattila · International Journal of Virtual Worlds and Human Computer Interaction · 2014
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that has gained an increasing interest during last years.Several fields (e.g.maintenance and education) have already started to integrate AR systems in their procedures.The preliminary results obtained from those works show a promising future for the technology.However, the number of tools that allow non-programmers to create new applications is still limited.Moreover, the great majority of these tools have still some limitations in terms of flexibility and reusability.The purpose of the platform presented in this paper is to face those problems and provide new means of AR application development.The main target of the platform is to serve as a unified system for aiding operators in the maintenance procedures in large scientific facilities.However, an important goal is that the platform can be flexible enough so it can be adapted to other fields.In order to demonstrate this flexibility, the platform has been also used to develop educational applications and a commercial educational platform.