Augmented Reality for Industrial Automation

[krthk86g]

Hello,

One of the Industrial Automation Company invited me to demonstrate the capability of Augmented reality which he will be using for his future requirement gathering, demonstration, and implementation. His client will be used on a day to day activity of monitoring the systems, service, etc.

Give me an idea or a sample use case:

1. How to do a plant design in creo
2. How to build vuforia use case for plant automation or any sample use case for plant automation
3.  I need to use view the entire plant, discuss with the client for the requirement
4. demonstrate the sample work
5. visualize the entire plant flow and when they use hololens and walk around the plat to find out more details. 

could you please provide me a use case or best practices to demonstrate. 

[sdidier]

Hello,

They are very large questions who can be answered quickly in a single thread.

I will try to give a good start at first.

1. At PTC, Creo is not one software. It is a product line with various different software to create and visualize 3D Models. I would recommand to use Creo Parametric to build a 3D assembly of the plant design. Any other CAD software can be used also until it can export in a file format who will be supported in Creo Illustrate.
2. In Creo Illustrate, import the model created at step 1, and create Sequences to display what are the mouvements or how to do a maintenance of a component or how to use of this plant design.
3. To share an AR Experience with other people during a meeting, the best solution is to have a Laptop with Windows 10, Vuforia View installed and an USB web cam connected. Be carreful, Augmented Reality is not Virtual Reality. It means AR is supposing over the reality. So, it needs to be on site where the plan design will be.
4. Explained at point 3
5. In Vuforia View, create a Project specific to 3D eyewears to use with Hololens. Be carreful, if you would use also in laptop and in mobile, it is needed to create another Project, specific to mobile. A port is needed to do between both Projects.

Best regards,

Samuel

[krthk86g]

Dear Samuel, 

sure, I have articulated a presentation in such a way that makes use of some PTC articles. having a handful of quires in here. the client is accepted and went for the next level of discussion. 

for example, there is a scenario that 10 machines are inlined with its own thingmarx or QR code. so how to use vuforia views.1 view is applicable for one machine but here we have 10 machines. can you guide me on how to address this in hololens? please do share it with me. 

Kind Regards,

Karthik 

[sdidier · Accepted solution]

Hello Karthik,

In any case, an Image Target will be used to manage  QR Code.

• Is it the same 10 machines or they are different ?

I will assume that they are different.

We can have various approach :

1. One Experience with 10 Views. One View by Machine.

      One common ThingMark can be used to find and to open the Experience.

      A menu will be displayed to select the View to open.

      A ThingMark or Image Target can be used also in each View to place 3D Model of Machine in world space.

                Bad side of this technic Experience can have a big file size. It will be long to download from Vuforia Experience Service. Switch between Views can be long also, if 3D Model has an heavy size or if they are complex.

            2. One Experience with 1 View and about 1 Machine. 

                 Experience will be with a lower size and performance will be better.

                 One common ThingMark can be used to find and to open the Experience also.

                 A specific menu who list all Experiences will be displayed after scanning of ThingMark to select the right Experience/Machine.

                 It can be source of error for end users.

                 A ThingMark or Image Target can be used also in each View to place 3D Model of Machine in world space.

         3. Similar at the solution at point 2. but using a same ThingMark in each Experience.

              ThingMark will be the same to find Experience and to place 3D Model in world space.

              So, here only 1 ThingMark  will be needed.

             Of course, we can use an Image Target to place the 3D Model.

            By the way, this Image Target can be the same also between Experiences.

        4. Create an Experience who has one View to list all 10 Experiences about each10 Machines.

             It might be a solution to have a menu with icons or pictures for each machines.

To be more accurate at point 1 and 2 about usage of ThingMarks, depending of scenario, it can be :

• 11 ThingMarks (1 common + 10 for each View/Experience)

• 1 ThingMark and 10 Image Target  (1 common + 10 for each View/Experience)

• 6 ThingMark and 5Image Target (1 common + (5  + 5 ) for each View/Experience)

• soon and soon

As wen can see, other solutions might be possible to mix between ThingMarks, Image Target and Experiences.

It is needed to keep in mind that all Experiences can be listed in Vuforia View, in Library menu when an URL is setup in Settings in Experience Service URL field.

By the way, it is the only solution to find and to open an Experience without a ThingMark except when using direct URL of Experience.

Except about solution 1 who is from my point of view, source of problem to download and about performance due to size, all other solutions are fine.

This point is very important in hardware with low ressources!

So, for Hololens device, it is needed to exclude it from my point of view.

It is more about how the end users will manage to open the right Experience needed who should guide the solution.

So the question is, how your customer is imaging the navigation to find the right Experience ?

In case, if 10 Machines are the same one.

Only 1 Experience with 1 View is needed with only one 1 ThingMark.

Best regards,

Samuel