Augmented tangible interfaces for CAD design review

Today's designers and engineers rely on CAD systems to help them finish a design efficiently and accurately, reducing cost and increasing productivity in the midst of competition. Collaborative work has became an increasingly crucial aspect of engineering design as teams grow larger and more diverse, spread across different locations, even around the world. The diversity of team members requires that collaborative tools be transparent with little or no learning curve required of their casual users. However, the complexity of the CAD system's interface can introduce a participation harrier. In a design review context, this barrier prevents diverse team members from directly interacting with the CAD objects. Communication is throttled by the CAD system's operator. restricting the flow: of ideas. The goal of the research presented in this paper is lo consider an alternative to 2D desktop based interfaces for design review. In considering this allernalivc interface, we focus on three critical tasks that characterize a typical design review namely: 3D browsing, 3D positioning/orientation, and 3D assembly/disassembly. Using augmented reality technology, we present a set of tangible user interfaces that support these three tasks by allowing the users to see virtual 3D models on tangible objects and enabling them to handle the virtual 3D models naturally as if they were real, physical objects Based on our experience, we believe that augmented reality based tangible interfaces are a promising area of further study, particularly, in their application the manipulation and evaluation of 3D designs. Furthermore, we conclude that augmented reality has the potential for substantially enhancing collaborative product development processes. despite some limitations that exist today.