Managing Authority:		Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Republic of Cyprus
Program:		Creation of high technology Enterprises through Business incubators
Project Title:		Augmented Reality Maintenance Enhancer System
Company Name:		A.R.M.E.S. LTD
Incubator:		Diogenes Business Incubator University of Cyprus Ltd
Project Start Date:		11/03/2009
Project End Date:		30/09/2010
Funding:		€ 200.000

The introduction of AR Technologies is not an option one may say, but a must for the affected industries. It is well understood and accepted by their key executives, that without the timely roll-out of those technologies, their business would get under tremendous jeopardy, as they will likely not be able anymore, to handle the growing complexity of their products within their own and even more within their partner’s organisations.

The AR-MES system is a software solution based on the fundamental technologies in the field of augmented reality (AR). AR is a new approach to human-machine interaction, which supports both high end and power applications in development and low-end applications on the belt of skilled workers in the actual manufacturing and servicing environment. The AR-MES system helps to improve the working environment by merging real objects with computer-generated virtual objects to allow for detailed engineering and processing instructions in design, production, service and maintenance of complex parts in automotive, aerospace and machine and plant construction industries. Roughly, the AR-MES System can be regarded as a complete virtual reality system embedded in an Internet browser.

The AR-MES system is divided into the two following major components:

The Remote Assistance Component: The Remote Assistance Component is a network application that allows to the expert to provide remote assistance to the technician which is located on site. The component gives the advantage to the remote expert to enhance the view of the technician with graphical instructions, such us as arrows, 3D models of parts etc. Moreover the remote expert checks and confirms each step of the maintenance/assembly process to avoid unwanted results.

The Authoring Tool: The authoring tool enables an efficient production of the augmented reality content, for example “augmented reality manuals”. Editors are able to define animations and workflows with corresponding animations in a very short time. All necessary parameters are made available over the interface. Pre-defined templates representing maintenance actions, such as "screw in", "screw out" etc can be easily parameterised and so re-defined for the given actions.

The core components of the AR-system are the following:

The renderer "OpenSG": the rendering system is built on the standard OpenGL, and is responsible for the visualization of the virtual objects in the AR-Browser-viewer. It handles the objects of the virtual scene organized in a graph structure.

The device interface: The device interface builds the connection between the VR-system and the interaction devices used for the application. This can be the well-known PC-mouse or a game joystick or more advanced tracking devices. The Device Interface offers a connection over a socket to any kind of devices connected directly to the computer or eventually to a remote device accessible over the network.

Vision-based tracking: The vision based tracking returns the camera position and orientation of the camera connected to the AR-Browser. Theses parameters have to be known precisely in order to place the virtual object at the right place in the image to be augmented.

Video-Server: The video server grabbed the image of the camera. Different format are supported, such as DirectShow, DirectX and FireWire.